Cortex XDR regulates agent licenses according to the available license quota and revocation policy.
Enforcement of Pro Licenses
For the Cortex XDR Pro per Endpoint license, Cortex XDR limits the number of Pro agents and associated Pro capabilities to the number of agents allocated by the license. Pro agent features include:
Enhanced Data Collection on the endpoint
Remediation analysis
Host Insights including Vulnerability Assessment, Host Inventory, and File Search and Destroy
You can further refine the endpoints on which you enable Pro features in your agent settings profiles.
If an endpoint requires a Pro per Endpoint license, and you’ve exceeded the number of available Pro per Endpoint licenses, one of your surplus Cloud per Host licenses is automatically consumed as a Pro per Endpoint license for the endpoint.
Pro per Endpoint licenses can be allocated for Cloud virtual machines up to Pro per Endpoint license capacity. To protect a Kubernetes or similar container orchestrator endpoint, Cortex XDR requires a Cortex Cloud per Host license.
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.
Enforcement of Cloud per Host Licenses
Kubernetes and other container orchestrator endpoints require Cortex XDR Cloud per Host licenses.
Cortex XDR auto-identifies if a host is running a container orchestrator and assigns the Cloud per Host license accordingly.
When the Pro per Endpoint license allocation is exceeded, Cloud per Host licenses are consumed as Cortex Pro Endpoint licenses.
Endpoint License Revocation
With Cortex XDR Prevent and Cortex XDR Pro per Endpoint licenses, 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:
Endpoint Type | License Return | Agent Removal from Cortex XDR console | Agent Removal from Cortex XDR Database |
---|---|---|---|
Standard and mobile devices | After 30 days | After 180 days | After 180 days |
(Non-Persistent) VDI and Temporary Session | Immediately after log-off for VDI, otherwise after 90 minutes | After 6 hours | After 7 days |
After a license is revoked, if the agent connects to Cortex XDR, reconnection will succeed as long as the agent has not been deleted.
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.
Note
It can take up to an hour for Cortex XDR to display revived endpoints.