Licensing basics
Overview
A license is your contract-backed right to use specific Ping Identity products and features, in specific environments, up to an agreed amount of usage for a set period of time.
Licenses are typically sold as subscriptions. During the term, you are entitled to use the licensed products up to the contracted limits and receive the associated support and maintenance.
Environment types
Licensing behaves differently across production and non-production environments. This section defines the common environment types and how they relate to usage.
Production
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A live environment that serves real end users and real traffic.
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Production environments are where service level agreements (SLAs) and uptime commitments apply.
Non-production environments
Non-production environments are used for development, testing, and experimentation. They are not intended for sustained production traffic and typically operate at lower scale.
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Development: An environment used by developers and quality assurance (QA) to experiment and prototype, build and test configurations and integrations, and run automated and integration tests.
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Sandbox: A more stable, long-lived non-production environment used to try out new features, validate configuration changes, test integrations before moving to user acceptance testing (UAT) or production, and provide a safe playground for admins.
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Staging or UAT: A testing environment intended to mirror production as closely as practical for UAT, performance testing within agreed limits, and cut-over rehearsals.
Your contract and Product Terms specify how many non-production environments are included and any usage expectations, such as fair-use guidelines for test traffic.