Common Issues: Licensing Errors

In an effort to assist our current and future customers, I’ve decided to start a series on common issues you may encounter when using SQL Sentry software, and the steps you can take to resolve them.

For my first post, I am going to focus on the licensing aspect of our product. Licensing is a very important part of the product, because without a proper license key, you will not be able to use the SQL Sentry Client at all. With that said, here are some of the common issues you can encounter when applying the SQL Sentry license key.

Note: Accessing the Customer Portal will be a common theme throughout this post, so if you are not yet familiar with our portal page, I would highly recommend watching the following video about the Customer Portal:

• Customer Portal video

For our avid readers, a blog post on this topic is also available here:

• Customer Portal blog post

License Key Mismatch

Note: This particular error message already includes a good description of the error and how to resolve it, but to be thorough, I thought I would still mention it here.

Error Description: Our license keys contain a value known as a hardware key. For full license users, the hardware key value is the name of the SQL Server instance housing the SQL Sentry database. If you receive this error while applying the license key, it indicates that the hardware key of the license does not match the name of the server currently housing the SQL Sentry database. This typically happens when you need to migrate your SQL Sentry Database to a new instance of SQL Server, or to a new server altogether.

How to Resolve this error: In order to resolve this error, you will need to log in to your customer portal account to update the instance name. Here are the steps you can take to update the hardware key of the license:

• Once you’ve logged into the customer portal, scroll down towards the bottom of the page and you will see a Licenses section.
• Select the license you would like to modify from the Perpetual Licenses list on the left.
• Now look for the Update Server Name section. Enter the name of the SQL Server instance housing the SQL Sentry database, as well as the reason for making this change.
• Click the Update button.
• Directly below this form, you will see a License Key form. Here you can choose to either e-mail the new license key or copy it to the clipboard.

Product Version Mismatch

Error Description: This error indicates that the version number of the license you are trying to apply is not valid for the version of SQL Sentry you are running. You will generally encounter this error when you try to apply the license after a major version upgrade (e.g.: SQL Sentry v9 to v10) because the version number of the license keys are incremented for each major version release.

How to Resolve this error: In order to resolve this issue, you will need to update your license version. Here are the steps you can take to upgrade the license key, after logging in to your customer portal account:

• Once logged in, you should see the Available Upgrades section.
• Check the license key(s) you would like to upgrade, then select the Upgrade button.
• Once the license is upgraded, the new license key will be e-mailed to you.

Invalid Signature

Error Description: This particular error indicates that the license key has been modified in some way. Something as little as adding an extra character or space in the license file can trigger this message.

How to Resolve this error: Grab the original license key attachment from the licensing e-mail again in order to re-apply it. You can also grab the original license key from the Customer Portal.

Invalid License Schema

Error Description: This error also indicates that the license key has been modified. To be specific, you will receive an “invalid license schema” error if the license key has been modified by an e-mail security system. When a license key is e-mailed to customers, the key is generally included as a text file attachment, and some security systems can modify the contents of certain attachments as they come through.

How to Resolve this error: Since the modified license key attachment is not going to work, you will need to grab the original license key directly from the Customer Portal (use the copy to clipboard functionality).

If you encounter any licensing issues not listed here, please feel free to contact support.

George Boakye

George works as a Support Engineer here at SentryOne. He assists customers with any questions they have about the platform, and he also works with customers to resolve issues they may be encountering with the software.
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George holds a BS degree in Computer Science from UNC Charlotte.