IoT & Device Feature Activation: Fleet-Wide Remote Feature Management

Challenge

A vendor builds sensor gateways for factories and warehouses. Every gateway has the same hardware and firmware. Two capabilities cost extra: on-device anomaly detection and a predictive maintenance model that runs on the gateway.

Customers don’t buy these for the whole fleet at once. A plant manager might license anomaly detection on the twelve gateways at one production line for a year, and add another twenty in a new hall six months later. The old process was a spreadsheet of serial numbers and dates, and the firmware enabled features from a config file the support team pushed out by hand. Renewals were missed in both directions: some gateways kept working without a valid contract, and others stopped although the customer had paid.

Approach

Each customer company is a licensee. The devices live inside it as individual licenses.

Product: Gateway Services
├── Module "Anomaly detection" – Rental, yellowThreshold = 30, redThreshold = 7 (days)
│   ├── Device:  FEATURE, one license per gateway, license number = serial
│   ├── 6 months: TIMEVOLUME 6 MONTH
│   └── 1 year:   TIMEVOLUME 1 YEAR
└── Module "Predictive maintenance" – Rental (same structure)

The Rental model was made for this: many instances of one thing, each licensed for its own period. A gateway becomes licensed for anomaly detection when it has a FEATURE license and a running TIMEVOLUME license linked to it through parentFeature.

When a customer orders anomaly detection for a gateway, the vendor’s order system makes two calls:

# 1. register the gateway in the module (license number = serial)
curl -u apiKey:SERVER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d "number=GW-30A1-0087" -d "licenseeNumber=CUST-ACME" \
  -d "licenseTemplateNumber=AD-DEVICE" \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/license

# 2. license it for a year, starting today
curl -u apiKey:SERVER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/json" \
  -d "licenseeNumber=CUST-ACME" -d "licenseTemplateNumber=AD-1YEAR" \
  -d "parentFeature=GW-30A1-0087" -d "startDate=2026-11-05T00:00:00Z" \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/license

NetLicensing has no batch endpoint, so a fleet order of 40 gateways is a loop over these calls. The order system uses an API key with the role ROLE_APIKEY_OPERATION, and that key stays on the server.

What the gateways see

Gateways don’t call NetLicensing themselves. The vendor’s device cloud validates each customer a few times a day and pushes the result to the gateways during their regular check-in:

curl -u apiKey:SERVER_API_KEY -H "Accept: application/xml" -X POST \
  https://go.netlicensing.io/core/v2/rest/licensee/CUST-ACME/validate

For each module, the response holds one entry per gateway, named by its serial, with valid, expires and expirationWarningLevel. A gateway enables a capability only while its own entry is valid. It keeps the last signed answer locally, so a gateway that loses its connection for a few days keeps working until the expires date it already knows.

Renewals

Rental gives every gateway a traffic light. With the thresholds above, an entry turns yellow 30 days before it expires and red 7 days before. The customer portal of the vendor’s device cloud shows these colours per gateway, so a plant manager sees at a glance which devices need renewing. A webhook for WARNING_LEVEL_CHANGED triggers a renewal quote from the vendor’s sales team.

Renewing is one more TIMEVOLUME license for the same parentFeature. When a gateway is scrapped or replaced, its FEATURE license is set to active=false.

Results

• Every gateway has its own licensed period, and expired gateways turn their premium capabilities off automatically.
• Customers can license part of a fleet and grow it at any time, device by device.
• Renewals show up as yellow and red entries weeks in advance, instead of being found in a spreadsheet afterwards.
• The firmware is the same for every gateway. Which capabilities run is decided by licensing data, not by builds or config files.

Managing licensed capabilities across a device fleet? Talk to us or read the Rental model documentation.