Handling trials and extensions for GitLab Self-Managed
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.
- Open the expired or soon to expire license and select
Duplicate License
- Set the
License type
toLegacy License
. - Delete the contents of
Zuora subscription ID
field if present. - Set the
Users count
number to what is requested. - Set the
Previous users count
number to the previous license if there are trueups OR if the requestedUser Count
is less than thePrevious User Count
. Otherwise, delete the contents. - Set the
Trueup count
number if present. - Set the
Plan code
to what is requested. - Ensure the
Trial
checkbox is checked. - Set
Starts at
to today’s date. - Set
Expires at
to the requested date. (Expires at 0:00 on this date) - Set
Notes
to the ticket or issue URL. - Click
Save
. The license will be automatically sent to the email specified in theEmail
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.
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