Too many license violations, how do I get searches working again?

[mctester]

Currently, when I try to run a search in Splunk, I get the following error message:

"Error in 'UnifiedSearch': Your Splunk license expired or you have exceeded your license limit too many times. Renew your Splunk license by visiting www.splunk.com/store or calling 866.GET.SPLUNK.

1) How do I figure out why this error occurred?

and...

2) How do I get rid of it and get searches running again?

[Mick · Accepted solution]

1) You're seeing this message because you indexed more data than your license allows, 5 times or more in the last 30 days. If the increase in volume is unexpected, use the searches on this page to help you figure out where this extra data came from. Searches on the '_internal' index should not be blocked

2) If you are an enterprise customer with a valid support agreement, in order to remove the error message and get all of your searches working again, you should file a case with Splunk Support and request a reset key. Make sure you have found and addressed the cause of the violations before you do this, because it's only going to happen again if you don't. If you are using a free license you will need to have 14 days of license compliance before searching is restored

3) You can also set up a search to run once daily and check on the license violation count, and alert you if it increases. The below search will only return results if the quota has incremented:

index=_internal source=*license_audit.log LicenseManager-Audit | delta quotaExceededCount as quotadiff | stats first(quotadiff) as quotadiff | search quotadiff>0 

You can use the instructions in the docs here to set this up