PHO Licence Extension

The PHO Licence Extension validates the licence used by PHO Collector components and reports licence health through Collector self-telemetry.

Capabilities

• Loads a PHO-provided licence from a file or environment-supplied value.
• Confirms that the licence applies to the current host.
• Checks component entitlements and configured capacity.
• Revalidates the licence periodically.
• Reports licence validity and expiry telemetry.
• Logs licence state changes and expiry warnings.

Prerequisites

• A PHO Collector distribution containing pho_license.
• A valid PHO-provided licence for the current host.
• Sufficient licensed capacity for every configured PHO receiver instance.
• Read permission for the Collector service account when a licence file is used.

Configuration

Exactly one licence source must be configured:

• file: path to a PHO-provided licence file.
• inline: base64-encoded licence content, normally supplied through an environment variable or secrets manager.

Warning thresholds must be positive, unique, and in descending order. Use an empty list to disable expiry warnings.

File-based example

extensions:
  pho_license:
    file: /etc/otelcol/license.json
    reporting_interval: 1h
    warning_thresholds_days: [30, 14, 7]

service:
  extensions: [pho_license]

Environment-based example

extensions:
  pho_license:
    inline: ${env:PHO_LICENSE_B64}
    reporting_interval: 1h
    warning_thresholds_days: [30, 14, 7]

service:
  extensions: [pho_license]

Defining the extension does not enable it. It must also appear under service.extensions.

Licence telemetry

Licence metrics are exposed through the Collector’s self-telemetry configuration.

Prometheus exporters typically expose dotted metric names with underscores, for example pho_license_valid.

Licence telemetry excludes customer identifiers, licence identifiers, host identity, licence contents, signatures, fingerprints, source paths, and raw validation errors.

Recommended alerts

groups:
  - name: pho-license
    rules:
      - alert: PHOLicenseInvalid
        expr: pho_license_valid == 0
        for: 5m
        labels:
          severity: critical
        annotations:
          summary: PHO licence is invalid or expired

      - alert: PHOLicenseExpiringSoon
        expr: pho_license_days_remaining <= 30 and pho_license_days_remaining > 0
        for: 15m
        labels:
          severity: warning
        annotations:
          summary: PHO licence expires within 30 days

Operational behaviour

• The licence is checked during Collector startup.
• Licence status is refreshed at the configured reporting interval.
• Expiry warnings are logged when a configured threshold is entered.
• Repeated checks within the same threshold do not generate duplicate warnings.
• A missing, invalid, expired, or host-mismatched licence prevents licensed receivers from starting.
• Each configured receiver instance uses one entitlement from the relevant component capacity.

Troubleshooting