# Summary By connecting your GitLab instance to the internet, your instance regularly (cadence TBD) sends a very small, minimal packet of data to our license server. All this packet includes your instance's version number, user counts and status (active/inactive) and product tier (Core, Starter Premium or Ultimate). This feature GitLab to provide you with invaluable services: * You will receive the latest security updates which GitLab can either simply warn you about or you can configure your instance to allow GitLab to patch these updates automatically for you. This is done using the version number. * Configurable, automatic/button click upgrades and system updates. * Fair, usage-based billing based off your inactive/active user counts. True-ups become extremely easy and license keys will no longer be required. This also makes it easier for GitLab to implement different billing models depending on specific customer needs/requirements. * By sending GitLab product tier information, our support engineering team will always know the correct SLA times for your support tickets. # Why is this important? We want to be able to provide the best service to our customers as possible. This feature reduces significant manual work on our sales and support teams, allows our security teams to protect you from vulnerabilities and your user management and billing experience is vastly improved, reducing friction and frustration for your system and billing administrators. Enabling automatic upgrades also removes the potential overhead for your sysadmins. This feature allows GitLab and our customers to collaborate more closely and opens up possibilities in the future for other exciting features our customers may ask for. Additionally, this protects GitLab from trial and license key abuse, meaning we spend less time handling those issues and more time helping _you_. # What if our instance is not connected to the internet? Rather than waiting for us to send you a license key, you can copy/paste a unique, encrypted and dynamic instance ID into a field your customer account, which syncs with our license server, that contains the data described above. This is something you will need to do anyway whether you are connected to the internet or not in order to create the initial link to our license server. If you are not connected to the internet, however, you can simply click a button on your account that says "My instance isn't connected to the internet" which will then generate a token for you to paste back into your instance to create the manual link. The downside of not connecting to the internet is you will need to manually re-paste that instance ID every time you want to update GitLab with that information, and you will miss out on live security patches when they are released. However, this is still better than the license key solution we have today as the instance ID/token will do the syncing for you rather than you and your GitLab account manager having to review everything manually during a true-up/renewal.