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Version: 17.x (unreleased)

Usage Reporting and Billing

Commercial editions of Teleport send anonymized usage data to Teleport so we can calculate billing metrics. This guide describes the anonymized usage data and the billing metrics we calculate.

Anonymized usage data​

The commercial editions of Teleport send anonymized information to Teleport's cloud infrastructure at reporting-teleport.teleportinfra.sh:443. This section describes the usage reporting system.

Usage reports​

Teleport usage reports contain the following information:

  • Teleport license identifier.
  • Anonymized cluster name and Teleport Auth Service host ID.
  • For each Teleport user, the anonymized user name and a count of interactions with infrastructure resources enrolled in your Teleport cluster.

Self-hosted Teleport deployments aggregate interaction data before it reaches Teleport Cloud. Teleport Cloud accounts provide this information as an anonymized log, which Teleport aggregates over the billing period.

The count of interactions includes the following:

  • Teleport logins
  • SSH and Kubernetes exec sessions
  • Desktop and database sessions
  • Web sessions with registered HTTP applications
  • Connections with registered TCP applications
  • SSH port forwards
  • Kubernetes API requests
  • SFTP actions

Anonymization​

The anonymization is done by passing names and IDs through HMAC-SHA-256. Teleport Cloud clusters use an HMAC key that's randomly generated when the cluster is initialized. Self-hosted Teleport deployments use an anonymization key that's generated and embedded in the license file at download time and never shared with us. This makes it infeasible for anyone without access to the cluster to deanonymize the data we store.

How reporting takes place​

Each cluster in a Trusted Clusters setup is responsible for reporting about the interactions with its own resources; therefore, all clusters will periodically reach out to Teleport Cloud to report usage, and should all be using the same license file for correct aggregate measurement.

The code that aggregates and anonymizes this data can be found in our GitHub repository.

For a restricted network environment you can configure Teleport Auth Service instances to send usage data through a proxy for version 16.0.4/15.4.7/14.3.21 or later. Set the TELEPORT_REPORTING_HTTPS_PROXY and TELEPORT_REPORTING_HTTP_PROXY environment variables to your proxy address. That will apply as the HTTP connect proxy setting overriding HTTPS_PROXY and HTTP_PROXY just for outbound usage reporting.

Billing metrics​

Teleport uses the anonymized usage data described in the previous section to calculate two types of billing metrics:

  • Monthly Active Users
  • Teleport Protected Resources

Usage metrics in the Web UI​

note

This will be displayed only for those on usage-based plans. Users will need permission to read the billing resource.

  1. Go to https://teleport.sh/ and enter your tenant name.
  2. Sign in using your administrator credentials.
  3. Click on "Access Management" at the top.
  4. Click on "Summary" under "Usage and Billing" at the left-hand side.
  5. Usage data for the current billing cycle will be displayed. Example:

Billing Cycle

Monthly Active Users​

Monthly Active Users (MAU) is the aggregate number of unique active users accessing Teleport.

We aggregate MAU over each monthly period starting on the subscription start date and ending on each monthly anniversary thereafter.

"Active" means a user having performed any activity that would appear in a Teleport audit log, for example, connecting to a resource via the Web UI or via tsh login, submitting an Access Request, and so on.

We do not count automated actions, such as the modification of a user's role by an administrator or the automatic creation of a user through an identity provider, as user activity.

Note: when configured to perform single-sign-on against an external identity provider, Teleport creates temporary user records that are valid for the duration of the SSO session. As a result, the Users page in Teleport's web UI will only show users who have recently logged in and is not a true representation of all active users over the last month.

Teleport Protected Resources​

The Teleport Protected Resources (TPR) metric is the aggregate number of unique resources connected to Teleport.

A "resource" is any unique bot, such as a CI/CD Jenkins or GitHub Actions job, or a distinct computing resource, including a Kubernetes cluster, SSH server, database instance, or serverless endpoint, that registers with the Teleport cluster at least once a month.

We aggregate TPRs during each day on an hourly basis, and take an hourly average to compute a daily TPR. Then we average the daily TPR over a monthly period, which starts on the subscription start date and ends on each monthly anniversary thereafter.

If you recreate a single resource more than once an hour, this will affect the hourly average. For example, if you were to create then delete 10 servers three times in one hour, Teleport would display 10 servers at any given time. However, for the entire hour, Teleport would report 30 protected servers.

Usage measurement for billing​

We aggregate all counts of the billing metrics on a monthly basis starting on the subscription start date and ending on each monthly anniversary thereafter.

The amount of usage purchased by a Teleport customer is based on the maximum aggregate amount of a billing metric in a given month during the term of the Subscription, also known as a high water mark calculation.

Reach out to [email protected] if you have questions about the commercial editions of Teleport.

Troubleshooting usage and billing​

Teleport aggregates usage reports on a submission service that runs either on self-hosted Teleport infrastructure or Teleport Cloud, depending on the user's plan. The submission service persists usage reports in the case of a submission failure, and deletes the reports after a successful submission. It is not possible to set up a third-party destination for usage events to independently verify usage event data.

If you are using Teleport Enterprise (Cloud), your usage data is accurate as long as Teleport-managed reporting infrastructure works as expected (check the status page for any incidents). On self-hosted Teleport Enterprise clusters, some conditions can interfere with data reporting. This section describes some scenarios that can lead to inaccurate data on self-hosted clusters.

If you suspect that any of these scenarios describe your Teleport cluster, or your usage data appears inaccurate, reach out to [email protected].

Multiple Teleport clusters​

In versions older than v14.3.1, Teleport does not de-duplicate users as expected across multiple Teleport clusters that belong to the same account. If you are running multiple Teleport clusters with affected versions, the count of active users may be higher than expected.

Unexpected license differences​

When distributing copies of your Teleport Enterprise (Self-Hosted) license across Auth Service instances, you must not download a license multiple times from your Teleport account. Instead, you must download a license once and copy that license across Auth Service instances. Otherwise, the Teleport usage reporting infrastructure will identify multiple licenses and misrepresent your usage numbers.

SSO users​

In Teleport, single sign-on (SSO) users are ephemeral. Teleport deletes an SSO user when its session expires. To count the number of SSO users in your cluster, you can examine Teleport audit events for unique SSO users that have authenticated to Teleport during a given time period. The Teleport documentation includes how-to guides for exporting audit events to common log management solutions so you can identify users that have authenticated using an SSO provider.