Understanding Volume-Based Licensing

As described in Licensing Overview, the DP can be licensed based on the amount of data ingested across all tenants in your organization on a daily basis. This topic provides details on volume-based licensing.

You can schedule and export PDF/CSV reports for Asset and Volume licenses from the Respond | Reports | License Usage page.

Refer to Understanding License Compliance for details on how Stellar Cyber enforces license policies.

Volume-Based Licensing Overview

Stellar Cyber collects data from a number of sources including its own Sensors, Log Sources, and Connectors. This data is normalized, enriched, and then compressed before it is saved on disk. Stellar Cyber’s volume license is applied after these processes take place, each of which affects the quantity of data:

  • Normalization – increases or decreases data volume, depending on the source

  • Enrichment – increases data volume

  • Compression – decreases data volume

Example

Consider a sample customer with two Tenants with the following on-disk collection volumes for a single day after normalization, enrichment, and compression has taken place:

Tenant

Day

On-Disk Collection
Tenant A 1 5GB
Tenant B 1 10GB

SUM

1

15GB

For this customer's example, the total licensing volume for Day 1 across all tenants is the sum of their individual collection volumes for the day – 15GB.

Frequently Asked Questions on Volume-Based Licensing

How can I reduce the data being counted against my licensed total?

The best way to reduce ingestion is to set filters that decrease the amount of data you bring into the Stellar Cyber platform.

Why does the ingestion shown for a day continue to change after the day is complete?

Keep in mind that it takes 24 hours to complete the volume usage calculations for a given UTC day. When a day ends in UTC time, its volume calculations are not final and may show small changes until the end of the next day in UTC time.

For example, consider the day of March 15, 2023. Stellar Cyber shows ingestion values for this day as soon as it concludes in UTC time. However, those values can and will show small changes for another 24 hours and are not complete until the end of March 16, 2023 in UTC time.