Handling trials and extensions for GitLab Self-Managed

Overview

Self-managed trials and grace periods cannot be extended - a trial license must be issued and applied to the instance in order to "extend" a license.

Requests for grace period extensions, temporary keys, temporary extensions, temporary licenses, and trial extensions all require generating a trial License.

Sales will often request through a Zendesk Ticket that we extend the duration of Self-Managed trials on behalf of their prospects. These tickets will always be raised from the GitLab Support End User gitlab_support@example.com, with the submitter cc'd on the ticket. The following workflow should be followed to service them.

If any fields when opening the ticket were filled out incorrectly, send a public reply in the ticket asking the submitter to supply the missing information.

NOTE: Non-trial licenses are required to match an existing subscription and these licenses generally have a span of 1 year. There is an ongoing discussion on how to support complex subscription models.

Support tries as much as possible to refrain from issuing non-trial licenses. We are allowed to issue trial licenses because they:

Have no grace period
Don't affect historical data tracking
Aren't tied to any subscriptions for revenue purposes

How to create a new trial license

Users should initiate a request on their own by clicking on the following link: https://about.gitlab.com/free-trial/?hosted=self-managed

How to extend an expired or soon to expire license

Before taking any action to create the trial license, get confirmation from the customer that they understand and accept the constraints that accompany a trial. Use the Support::L&R::Trial Subscription - Exclusions Sign Off macro in Zendesk for this purpose. Be sure to assign the ticket to yourself so that you will receive the customer's response and be able to take action quickly.
Open the expired or soon to expire license and select Duplicate License
Set the License type to Legacy License.
Delete the contents of Zuora subscription ID field if present.
Set the Users count number to what is requested.
Set the Previous users count number to the previous license if there are trueups. Otherwise, delete the contents.
Set the Trueup count number if present.
Set the Plan code to what is requested.
Ensure the Trial checkbox is checked.
Set Starts at to today's date.
Set Expires at to the requested date.
Set Notes to the ticket or issue URL.
Click Save. The license will be automatically sent to the email specified in the Email field.

If you need to send a trial license to another contact, use the Forward license email tab after saving the new license.

Emergency Weekend Licenses

If you're on call and you need a license generated, but don't have access to the CustomersDot interface, follow the Weekend Emergencies - License Request workflow.