Releasing product licenses from devices

Devices with an installed and activated Secure Endpoint Agent consume an Absolute product license and have agent status The operating condition of a device's Secure Endpoint Agent. Possible values are Active (indicates that the device's agent has connected to the Absolute Monitoring Center), Inactive (indicates one of the following: the device was moved to another account; the device was unenrolled, but it is now set to be reactivated; or the device had Persistence enabled at the factory, but it has not yet called in to the Absolute Monitoring Center), and Disabled (indicates that the agent is either flagged for removal or removed from the unenrolled device). Inactive and Disabled devices do not consume a license. of Active. From time to time, you may find that the agent is installed on more devices than you have licenses for, and some devices are now unlicensed. This situation can occur when the Secure Endpoint Agent is:

  • installed on new devices without removing the agent from older devices that you've retired.
  • inadvertently installed on some devices using a script or disk image.

By identifying the devices consuming a license that shouldn't be, and then unenrolling each device to remove its agent, you can release licenses so they can be used by other devices. You'll also want to clean up your licenses before they expire so you know exactly how many licenses to renew, and how many additional licenses you need.

Devices with an agent status set to Inactive or Disabled do not consume a license.

By default, the All Devices page in the Devices area shows all devices with an installed and activated Secure Endpoint Agent, meaning the devices are consuming an Absolute product license. To uninstall the agent from a device and release its license, unenroll the device from your account. To find devices to unenroll, you can add one or more filters to the All Devices page.

The following are some examples of filtered searches that may help you identify devices to unenroll:

If you want to ... Filter on ... For example ...
Replace older hardware with new machines Model You've acquired new hardware and you may want to retire some older models of your devices. Add a filter to search for specific device makes and models that you know have been retired.
Find devices on which the Secure Endpoint Agent shouldn't be installed You suspect that the Secure Endpoint Agent was inadvertently installed via a disk image on some virtual machines that you didn't buy licenses for. To see if this is the case, add the following filters to the All Devices page: Model contains vm OR Parallels OR virtual OR Hyper-V.
Find devices that are no longer in use Last connected You want to search for devices that haven’t connected to the Absolute Monitoring Center in the past 6 months. To find these devices, you add the following filter to the All Devices page: Last connected not within last 6 months.
Find devices with an older version of the operating system to retire OS version You think there may be some Windows devices in your fleet that are running Window 8.1 and you want to replace them with Windows 11 devices. Find the Windows 8.1 devices by adding the following filter to the All Devices page: OS version contains Windows 8.1.
Find devices to retire based on a device naming convention Device Name Your device naming convention dictates that the device name assigned to all desktop machines are prepended with DSK-. Your organization decided that the Secure Endpoint Agent shouldn't be installed on these devices, so you add the following filter to the All Devices page to see if any of these devices are enrolled: Device name begins with DSK-.

To find and unenroll devices:

  1. Log in to the Secure Endpoint Console as a user with the Perform permission for Unenroll Device.
  2. On the navigation bar, click Devices.

    Notice that the Agent Status is Active filter shows in the page's filter area.

  3. Find the devices that you want to unenroll by adding the appropriate filters.

    To create a report that shows all HP Elitebook laptops (models 8560P or 8570P) with an installed and activated Secure Endpoint Agent, do the following:

    1. Leave the Agent Status filter as is.

    2. Add a filter by doing the following:

      1. Click and add the following filter: Model is HP ELITEBOOK 8560P.
      2. Click OR and add the following filter: Model is HP ELITEBOOK 8570P.
      3. Click Apply.

    The results are updated to show active devices that match either the 8560P or 8570P model number.

  4. To unenroll the devices, do one of the following:

    • To select devices on the All Devices page, submit an Unenroll Device request.

    • To upload a file of device identifiers:

      1. Remove all report columns on the filtered All Devices page except the Device name column.
      2. Export the page using the Excel (.xlsx) format.
      3. Open the report in Excel and delete all but one of the identifiers. For example, leave the Identifier column. Also delete the column header row.
      4. Save the file as a .csv file.
      5. Submit a bulk Unenroll Device request.

For more information about managing your Absolute product licenses, visit the Learning Hub. To access the Learning Hub, click (Help and Support) on the quick access toolbar and then click Resources > The Learning Hub.