Licensing
Sondar has two editions. Community is free, permanently, and needs no license key. Pro adds high availability, searchable cold storage, finer access control and support with a response-time commitment. Every new installation runs Pro for its first 30 days.
The license agreement defines its limits by reference to this page: the Community Limits and the size of a Compute Unit below are the ones for this release.
The Compute Unit
Section titled “The Compute Unit”One Compute Unit is one vCPU. Every vCPU allocated to a Sondar server node counts, in every environment:
- in a container, its CPU limit counts — or, with none set, the vCPUs of the host it runs on. Fractions round up, and each hardware thread is one vCPU;
- every server node counts, web and data alike;
- agent hosts do not count, and neither do the temporary extra nodes of an upgrade, a restart or a reschedule.
Nothing else is measured: not data volume, retention, events, hosts, agents or users.
Each node reports the vCPUs its JVM sees, which follows the rules above, and the license page sums them. A condition must hold for 15 minutes before it is shown, so a rolling upgrade’s extra pod does not raise one.
Community Limits
Section titled “Community Limits”| Community | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Capacity | 16 Compute Units in total, across all of an organization’s installations | from 16, as licensed |
| Master-eligible nodes | one | three or more (high availability) |
| Logs, metrics, traces, APM, SonQL, dashboards, alerting | all | all |
| Volume, retention, agent and user limits | none | none |
| Audit log: recorded, viewed, filtered, exported, verified | yes | yes |
| Audit log kept longer than 90 days | — | yes |
Read-only access for auditors (the built-in auditor role) | — | yes |
| Searchable cold storage on S3-compatible object storage | — | yes |
| Custom roles, per-repo and row-level search limits | — | yes |
| Data masking | — | yes |
| SCIM user and group provisioning | — | yes |
| Support with a first response in 1 business day for high-impact issues, 2 otherwise | — | yes |
Built-in roles, single sign-on (OpenID Connect and SAML 2.0), LDAP and CAS login, offline updates and every app are in Community. SCIM provisioning is in Pro; when Pro ends it can still deactivate and delete users but not add them (details). The audit log is in both editions; Pro adds keeping it longer than 90 days and read-only access for auditors, and when Pro ends a longer setting and existing auditors keep working, but neither can be extended. Multi-tenancy and air-gap update bundles are not offered yet in either edition.
Pro support
Section titled “Pro support”Pro includes support by email with these first-response times, measured in US Pacific business hours, Monday to Friday (excluding US public holidays):
| Impact | Meaning | First response |
|---|---|---|
| High | production is down or badly degraded, or data is at risk | within 1 business day |
| Normal | everything else: a question, a defect with a workaround, a request | within 2 business days |
These are times to a first response from an engineer, not to a fix. There is no 24x7 commitment. Community is supported by the Sondar team and other users in GitHub Discussions, with no response-time commitment.
The 30-day Pro trial
Section titled “The 30-day Pro trial”A new installation runs Pro for 30 days from its first start, within 16 Compute Units. The clock is kept once for the whole cluster, so a restart or another node does not restart it. Seven days before the end, the license page and the message center say so.
One more trial per major release. After that trial, an administrator with the License permission can start one more 30-day Pro trial from the license page (Start a 30-day Pro trial), or from the dialog that appears when a change needs Pro. It is available once in each major release, runs under the same rules as the first, and is started here and now: nothing is sent to Sondar. It is not offered to an installation that has held a Pro subscription.
Notices that point at Pro. On Community, the license page and the message center say so when the server nodes use more than three quarters of the 16 vCPU, and when disk pressure has deleted the oldest data of an index — searchable cold storage on your own object storage keeps that data instead. They are information, like every notice here.
When a trial or subscription ends
Section titled “When a trial or subscription ends”The installation continues as Community. Nothing is switched off and no data is touched:
- ingest, storage, querying and search carry on exactly as before;
- Pro configuration that already exists keeps running — including access restrictions and masking rules, so an ending never exposes data;
- that configuration can be reduced or removed, but not created, changed or expanded. A request that would expand it answers with what it needs, for example “Pro feature: Data masking. … Existing configuration keeps working and can still be reduced or removed.”
A paid subscription is announced on the license page and in the message center 30 days before it expires, and gets 30 days of grace after it expires, during which Pro configuration can still be changed. A trial has no grace. A release published after a subscription has expired runs as Community.
Over capacity
Section titled “Over capacity”Using more vCPU than you license, or running more than one master-eligible node on Community, is shown as a warning on the license page and in the message center. It is never enforced by the software: nothing is restricted and nothing slows down. Under the license agreement you stay within the capacity you license and buy any extra; once a year, on request, you confirm your usage in writing. Sondar never measures your deployment remotely — the product sends nothing to Sondar.
Getting Pro
Section titled “Getting Pro”Pro is ordered from Sondar at the price on sondar.dev/pricing. The key arrives with the order confirmation; add it as below. In the product, the pages whose settings are Pro — data masking, roles, and the object-storage tier of a repository — say so before you start, and a change that needs Pro opens a dialog with links to the License page and the pricing page, instead of a message that disappears.
Adding a Pro key
Section titled “Adding a Pro key”Open License from its icon in the top bar, choose Add a Pro key, and paste the key. It needs an administrator with the License permission. The key is checked offline against a public key built into the product; there is no activation server.
A key carries its edition, its Compute Units and its expiry, and nothing else — it is not tied to a machine, so it survives moving or rebuilding an installation. Several keys add up: a 32-unit key and a 16-unit key are 48 units. A key can be removed on the same page; without one the installation runs Community.
The license agreement
Section titled “The license agreement”The agreement is accepted during first-run setup. When an upgrade brings a new version of it, an administrator is asked to accept the new version after signing in; each acceptance is recorded with who accepted, when, and which version. Nobody else is stopped while it is pending.