Hello,
We have been receiving a large number of license errors since last Friday, June 5. Users with active licenses are receiving license errors, and the indicators, strategies, and add-ons are not loading on the charts.
The developer, who has the code open in the NinjaScript Editor with the license method included in the code, is also receiving the same error.
Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Is NinjaTrader working on it?
Thanks.
Yes, any open-source code or assembly DLL that uses the NT Ecosystem Licensing may be affected. As of Monday at 5:40 a.m. ET, NT Platform Support had not responded to my Sunday morning email, which included a screenshot of the popup error and the trace file errors. I received the same error in both 8.1.7.0 and 8.1.7.1.
I sended a message to the Vendor Ecosystem colleages but they haven’t responded yet. I hope they can solve it today.
Yes, there has been an issue. Understand that NinjaTrader support does not monitor these forums - you’ll want to contact vendor support directly using vendorsupport@ninjatrader.com for up-to-date guidance.
Hey Bruce! Thanks for the info. Have you received any response from vendor support today?
No, I did not report it myself - we run a completely separate vendor licensing system (quantkey.com) that can optionally interoperate with NinjaTrader Ecosystem licensing, so we received reports from our customers who are using Ecosystem licensing which is how we are aware of it. Our customers using our own licensing system were unaffected.
This is a good example to minimize dependency on NinjaTrader. I would think a simple server + database check can be used for verification. I would just design the workflow in a way to allow user access during temporary outages.
Three threads going now Ninja Strategies not working, asking for license and https://discourse.ninjatrader.com/t/new-licensing-issue/7004 and License error from 1.8.7.1
NinjaTrader reports this is resolved and you just need to restart NT Desktop.
Yup had the same issue ,
We experienced the same licensing issue that many vendors and users reported this week with the newer email-based licensing system. Rather than wait for a platform-side resolution and leave our subscribers without access to their tools, we immediately issued a patch that migrated the affected indicators back to the legacy licensing framework.
The result was an immediate restoration of service with minimal disruption to our users.
For our business, this event reinforced our confidence in the legacy licensing system, which has proven to be significantly more stable and reliable in production. As a result, we will be continuing to use the legacy framework moving forward and will not be migrating additional products to the email-based licensing system at this time.
Glad to hear the issue has been addressed, but for us, the rollback has already provided a stable long-term solution.
@madeinnyc 100% agreed. We also believe it is really important to keep supporting the Machine ID-based NinjaTrader vendor licensing, as flexible and valuable as the email-based licensing is.
At my company we are big fans of the email-based licensing as a second option for users who have issues with their NinjaTrader Machine ID changing too often, but because 1) the email-based license system is newer and less tested, 2), the email-based system doesn’t work in older versions of NinjaTrader, and 3) in our tests the Machine ID-based license check is a little faster (which adds up to a big difference in total duration of optimizations over tons of parameters but isn’t important for users that don’t optimize strategies), we decided to give users a choice of Machine ID-based or email-based licensing from within our product through the use of a multi-step assistant that pops up when it is needed, or if the user chooses to manually open the assistant to change their licensing choice. Here is how that screen looks, with including our advice to users about when to choose which license type, in case this helps future vendors that see this post:
We have things set up where regardless of a user’s choice of license type they can use our product during the free trial period without having to wait for us to set the licensing up for them (since enabling this takes literally zero work, thanks to @NinjaTrader_PHodges and the rest of the vendor team!), but we still have to set things up manually when they choose to purchase a license so that the NinjaTrader vendor license will be valid after the free trial period.
In the future is would be amazing to automate the process of generating the paid license, and I think this can be done at least for email-based licensing if not Machine ID-based licensing… maybe we will get around to automating the licensing process when we can come up for air!
In the future is would be amazing to automate the process of generating the paid license, and I think this can be done at least for email-based licensing if not Machine ID-based licensing… maybe we will get around to automating the licensing process when we can come up for air!
We’d love to win you over to QuantKey for this. We fully automate from the moment of payment or trial creation and handle it all 100% whether on optional Ecosystem licensing or via our own Direct licensing system with triple redundancy.
Hi @QuantKey_Bruce,
While this won’t be something for which we will be in the market for the indefinite future, I have checked out your website in the past and was very impressed. I like how your company has an entire suite of products and services for NinjaTrader vendors, and I think you made really good choices on the specific products and services you chose to include in the suite. I will certainly keep QuantKey in mind to talk about with my business partners in the (probably far) future once we are in an entirely different phase in our business when we (and I specifically) can come up for air and can even consider the other many projects we have on our list to consider in order to improve our business, although frankly when I look at our list of projects and priorities this truly couldn’t occur any time soon. Thank you for reaching out and I wish you continued success with QuantKey.
Best regards,
Brook from Quagensia
Thanks for sharing your experience. I can definitely see the value of offering both options and giving users the flexibility to choose the licensing method that best fits their situation.
For us, the biggest challenge wasn’t the concept of email-based licensing itself, but the support burden that came with it. Even though our signup process clearly required users to provide the exact email associated with their NinjaTrader account, we still ran into a surprising number of activation issues. Many traders simply didn’t remember which email was on file with NinjaTrader, and because the platform doesn’t always make the full email address easily visible, verifying the correct spelling became a challenge. The case-sensitive nature of the email matching added another layer of friction.
Fortunately, we continued collecting Machine IDs during signup, even for users being licensed through the email-based system. That ended up being extremely valuable during this recent incident because it allowed us to quickly transition affected users back to the legacy licensing framework with minimal disruption. Had we not maintained those Machine IDs, the rollback process would have been significantly more difficult.
We provided feedback on these challenges early on, but never saw any changes implemented. When this latest outage occurred, it ultimately reinforced our confidence in the legacy Machine ID-based system, which has been exceptionally stable for us over the years.
I agree that offering both options is likely the ideal long-term approach. For our user base, however, the legacy system has proven to be the more reliable solution from both a customer experience and support perspective.
Appreciate you sharing your workflow and implementation details. It’s always helpful to see how other vendors are approaching these challenges.
@madeinnyc Thank you for sharing all of this. Congrats on having the IT instincts/IQ/scar tissue to think to collect Machine IDs as a redundant failover to email addresses for the email-based licensing.
My concerns about the email-based licensing system (as much as I love the idea of it and have had a good experience with it with the exception of the recent outage) are literally all the ones you mentioned: 1) case-sensitivity of email addresses, 2) the user not knowing the email address they used to sign up for NinjaTrader, and 3) the recent outage.
Plus the fourth one that is important to us is that the performance of the email-based system is slower that the Machine ID-based system… I really wish that the slow part of email licensing check could just be on app startup, not on each backtest run in a Strategy Analyzer optimization over a large combinations of input parameters. For our users that want to do such optimizations, they unfortunately need to use Machine ID for the fastest optimization experience. Not sure if this has been address in the latest version, but pinging @NinjaTrader_PHodges just in case he would appreciate being reminded of it, or reminding a colleague of it, in case it isn’t fixed yet and a developer at NinjaTrader has some available time to look into fixing this.
Wishing you the best in your business endeavors @madeinnyc and see you around this community.
