Handling trials and extensions for GitLab Self-Managed

Issuing a license to “extend” Self-managed trials and grace periods

Overview

Self-managed trials and grace periods cannot be extended - a trial license must be issued and applied to the instance in order to “extend” a license. Requests for grace period extensions, temporary keys, temporary extensions, temporary licenses, and trial extensions all require generating a trial License.

Sales will often request through an Internal Request / Zendesk Ticket that we extend the duration of Self-Managed trials on behalf of their prospects. These tickets will always be raised from the GitLab Support End User gitlab_support@example.com, with the submitter cc’d on the ticket. The following workflow should be followed to service them.

If any fields when opening the ticket were filled out incorrectly, send a public reply in the ticket asking the submitter to supply the missing information.

NOTE: Non-trial licenses are required to match an existing subscription and these licenses generally have a span of 1 year. There is an ongoing discussion on how to support complex subscription models.

Support tries as much as possible to refrain from issuing non-trial licenses. We are allowed to issue trial licenses because they:

  • Have no grace period
  • Do not affect historical data tracking
  • Are not tied to any subscriptions for revenue purposes

How to extend an expired or soon to expire license

Note: Unlike SaaS, a Self-managed extension does not require a pre-existing Trial license. Instead, start with the current almost-expired license, or most-recent expired license.

  1. Open the expired or soon to expire license and select Duplicate License
  2. Set the License type to Legacy License.
  3. Delete the contents of Zuora subscription ID field if present.
  4. Set the Users count number to what is requested.
  5. Set the Previous users count number to the previous license if there are trueups OR if the requested User Count is less than the Previous User Count. Otherwise, delete the contents.
  6. Set the Trueup count number if present.
  7. Set the Plan code to what is requested.
  8. Ensure the Trial checkbox is checked.
  9. Set Starts at to today’s date.
  10. Set Expires at to the requested date. (Expires at 0:00 on this date)
  11. Set Notes to the ticket or issue URL.
  12. Click Save. The license will be automatically sent to the email specified in the Email field.

If you need to send a trial license to another contact, use the Forward license email tab after saving the new license.

How to create a new trial license

Users should initiate a request on their own by clicking on the following link: https://about.gitlab.com/free-trial/?hosted=self-managed

Emergency Weekend Licenses

If you’re on call and you need a license generated, but don’t have access to the CustomersDot interface, follow the Weekend Emergencies - License Request workflow.

Last modified August 28, 2023: Clarify SM expiration of trial license at 0.00 (e91467d6)