How PEM licensing works v9

PEM is intended to be used for monitoring and managing Postgres instances supported by EDB. As such, if you have a subscription that entitles you to use PEM, adding it to your stack to monitor such instances generally incurs no additional license costs.

Licensing rules

To use PEM, you must have an EDB Standard or Enterprise subscription.

Any Postgres servers you monitor using PEM must be covered by an EDB Standard or Enterprise subscription. This is true whether you're installing the PEM agent locally, through remote monitoring, or by making a client connection from the PEM web application.

Non-Postgres servers that don't otherwise consume cores (for example PGD Proxy nodes or machines running Barman) may be monitored by PEM. No additional cores are consumed by monitoring such servers with PEM.

The Postgres instance used as the PEM backend doesn't consume cores from your subscription. Likewise, no cores are consumed by any other PEM components. All these components are covered by your support agreement.

Examples

Adding PEM to a fully supported environment

Suppose a customer with an Enterprise subscription for 32 cores has 8 x 4-core servers running EDB Postgres Advanced Server, thereby fully consuming their 32 cores. This customer can install PEM on a fifth server and use it to monitor their 8 EDB Postgres Advanced Server servers. This configuration requires no change to their subscription, as the PEM server doesn't consume cores, and the monitored EDB Postgres Advanced Server instances are already fully covered.

Likewise, if this customer added a Barman server and connected it to PEM for monitoring, they would consume no additional cores.

Adding unsupported servers to PEM

Suppose a customer with a Standard subscription for 36 cores has PEM and 6 x 6-core servers running PostgreSQL covered by EDB support, thereby consuming their 36 cores, as in the previous example.

The customer also has 10 x 2-core PostgreSQL servers that aren't covered by any EDB subscription. These servers must not be monitored by PEM, as they aren't covered by a Standard or Enterprise subscription. If the customer wants to monitor these servers, they must add 20 more cores to their subscription.