License Allocation - Administrator Guide - Cortex XDR - Cortex - Security Operations

For the Cortex XDR Pro license, Cortex XDR limits the number of Pro agents and associated Pro capabilities to the number of agents allocated by the license. You can further refine the endpoints on which you enable Pro features in your agent settings profiles.

After utilizing all available Pro per Endpoint and Cloud per Host licenses, Cortex XDR falls back to a Cortex XDR Prevent policy that protects the endpoint but does not include Pro-specific capabilities. When you exceed the permitted number of Pro and Cloud agents, Cortex XDR displays a notification in the notification area. Cortex XDR permits a small grace over the permitted number but begins enforcing the number of agents after 14 days. If additional Pro agents are required, increase your Cortex XDR Pro per Endpoint license capacity.

To protect a Kubernetes or similar container orchestrator endpoint, Cortex XDR requires a Cortex Cloud per Host license. Cortex XDR auto-identifies if a host is running a container orchestrator and assigns the Cloud per Host license accordingly. Pro per Endpoint licenses can be allocated for Cloud virtual machines up to Pro per Endpoint license capacity. If an endpoint requires a Pro license, and you’ve exceeded the number of available Pro licenses, one of your surplus Cloud per Host licenses is automatically consumed as a Pro per Endpoint license for the endpoint.

Cortex XDR manages licensing for all endpoints in your organization. Each time you install a new Cortex XDR agent on an endpoint, the Cortex XDR agent registers with Cortex XDR to obtain a license. In the case of non-persistent VDI, the Cortex XDR agent registers with Cortex XDR as soon as the user logs in to the endpoint.

Cortex XDR issues licenses until you exhaust the number of license seats available. Cortex XDR also enforces a license cleanup policy to automatically return unused licenses to the pool of available licenses. The time at which a license returns to the license pool depends on the type of endpoint:

After a license is revoked, if the agent connects to Cortex XDR, reconnection of a specific endpoint will succeed as long as the agent has not been deleted, otherwise, the endpoint is registered as a new endpoint.

If a deleted agent tries to connect to Cortex XDR during the 180 days period, the agent can resume connection and maintain its agent ID. After the 180 days period, the agent ID is deleted alongside all the associated data. In order to reconnect the agent, you must use Cytool to reconnect it or reinstall it on the endpoint, and the agent will be assigned a new ID and a fresh start.