License and Object Estimation Tool

License Planning

The Telemetry Collector includes a specialized licensing mode designed to help customers accurately estimate their software license requirements. By deploying the collector in a representative lab environment and pointing real network devices at it, the collector will report the number of unique "objects" discovered within the telemetry data stream. This count is crucial because each unique object requires one telemetry software license.

Customers must also possess the Platform Right-to-Use (RTU) software license before purchasing any telemetry licenses. In this licensing mode, the Telemetry Collector operates in a standalone mode that does not require or use a Sensor Collector or Analytics connection. When deployed in Licensing Mode, the Telemetry Collector operates independently and never reports any data to Provider Connectivity Assurance; it simply presents the output of object counts to be used prior to building a full telemetry ingestion pipeline.

Important Consideration: While this tool provides valuable data, the quantity of objects generated by a single router may not be uniform across all routers in a customer's environment. This is because individual routers can have varying numbers of entities (e.g., VLANs, policies, CPU cores) that stream performance metrics, leading to different object counts per device. Therefore, while the Telemetry Collector isn't an exact measurement for every router, it serves as an excellent tool for estimating the total quantity of objects when applied to a representative router within the network. For smaller Proof of Concept (PoC) deployments involving a limited number of routers, the tool can be used on each device to sum up the total object count.

Instructions:

Step 1: Deploying the Telemetry Collector in Licensing Mode
Step 2: Starting the Telemetry Collector and Collecting Object Counts