Connect

Enterprise Licensing

You need a valid Enterprise Edition license to use the following enterprise features:

Table 1. Enterprise features in Redpanda Connect
Feature Description Restrictions Without Valid License

Allow or deny lists

Limit the Redpanda Connect components that users can run within data pipelines on a Redpanda Connect instance.

No change.

Enterprise connectors

Additional inputs, outputs, and processors available only to enterprise customers.

All enterprise connectors are blocked.

FIPS compliance for Redpanda Connect

Run Redpanda Connect using a FIPS-compliant version of rpk, the Redpanda command-line interface (CLI).

No change.

Redpanda Connect configuration service

A configuration block that you can use to send logs and status events to a topic on a Redpanda cluster.

No change.

Secrets management

Retrieve secrets values from a remote system, such as a secret management solution, without setting environment variables.

No change.

Get an enterprise license

You can either upgrade to an Enterprise Edition license, or generate a trial license key that’s valid for 30 days.

Product-scoped licenses

In Redpanda Connect 4.78.0 and later, licenses specify which Redpanda products they cover. To unlock enterprise features, your license must include the Redpanda Connect product. Licenses issued specifically for Redpanda Connect include it, and Enterprise Edition licenses issued before product scoping was introduced are valid for all products. If you are not sure which products your license covers, contact your Redpanda account team.

Apply a license key to Redpanda Connect

When you have downloaded the license key, you can apply it using either the CLI (rpk) or Helm on Kubernetes.

Redpanda Connect looks for a license in the following order and uses the first one it finds:

  1. A license string passed with the --redpanda-license flag or set in the REDPANDA_LICENSE environment variable. The flag takes precedence over the environment variable.

  2. The license file set in the REDPANDA_LICENSE_FILEPATH environment variable.

  3. The default license file at /etc/redpanda/redpanda.license.

  • rpk (local or VM)

  • Helm (Kubernetes)

If you have a license key file, either:

  • Save the license key to /etc/redpanda/redpanda.license.

  • Set the environment variable REDPANDA_LICENSE_FILEPATH to point to the file where the license key is stored.

If you have a license string, either:

  • Set the environment variable REDPANDA_LICENSE to the value of the full license string.

  • Run the following command using the full license string:

rpk connect run --redpanda-license <license-string> ./<connect-configuration>.yaml

Replace the following placeholders:

  • <license-string>: The full license key string.

  • <connect-configuration>: The name of your Redpanda Connect configuration file.

To enable enterprise features, you must provide a license key as a Kubernetes Secret and reference it in your deployment configuration.

  1. Create the Secret:

    kubectl create secret generic redpanda-connect-license \
  --from-literal=REDPANDA_LICENSE=<your-license-key> \
  --namespace <namespace>

  2. Reference the license secret in your values.yaml or as a Helm value:

    envFrom:
  - secretRef:
      name: redpanda-connect-license

This configuration mounts the license key as the REDPANDA_LICENSE environment variable, allowing Redpanda Connect to use enterprise features.

Verify a license

Redpanda Connect checks the license key status at runtime. If the license key is unavailable or has expired, you are blocked from using enterprise connectors.

You can view the license key’s expiration date at any time in the Redpanda Connect logs:

INFO Running main config from specified file       @service=benthos benthos_version=4.50.0 path=connect_2.yaml
INFO Successfully loaded Redpanda license          @service=benthos expires_at="2025-04-18T15:41:56+01:00" license_org=67XXX license_type="enterprise"

If no valid enterprise license is loaded, or your license does not cover Redpanda Connect, enterprise components fail with the following error:

this feature requires a valid Redpanda Enterprise Edition license that includes the Connect product. For more information check out: https://docs.redpanda.com/redpanda-connect/get-started/licensing/

If no license is loaded at all, see Apply a license key to Redpanda Connect earlier on this page. If your license is valid but doesn’t cover Redpanda Connect, contact your Redpanda account team to add the Redpanda Connect product to your license.

When a valid enterprise license is loaded, Redpanda Connect also exports the redpanda_cluster_features_enterprise_license_expiry_sec metric, which reports the number of seconds until the license expires. You can alert on this metric to catch expiring licenses before enterprise connectors stop working.

Next steps