Licensing

CritterWatch is part of the JasperFx ecosystem and is available in three tiers.

License Tiers

Feature	Free	Professional	Enterprise
Real-time monitoring (unlimited services)	✓	✓	✓
Dead letter queue management	✓	✓	✓
Basic alerting	✓	✓	✓
Projection monitoring & controls	✓	✓	✓
Activity timeline	✓	✓	✓
Scheduled message management	✓	✓	✓
Durability monitor	✓	✓	✓
Edit-and-replay DLQ messages		✓	✓
Batch DLQ operations		✓	✓
Advanced alert thresholds (per-message-type)		✓	✓
Multi-tenant support		✓	✓
Chaos Monkey		✓	✓
Message topology visualization		✓	✓
CSV/JSON export		✓	✓
Metrics backends (Prometheus, OTEL)		✓	✓
SLA-backed support			✓
Custom integrations			✓
On-premises license server			✓

Free Tier

The free tier is fully open-source (MIT License) and includes core monitoring, DLQ management, and projection controls. It is suitable for small teams, development environments, and organizations that need basic visibility into their Wolverine applications.

Professional Tier

The Professional tier adds all advanced operational features including edit-and-replay, multi-tenant support, chaos monkey, and metrics integrations. A license key is required and is validated at startup.

Pricing is per-deployment (number of CritterWatch server instances), not per monitored service.

Enterprise Tier

Enterprise includes everything in Professional plus SLA-backed support, custom integrations, and the option to run a private license validation server for air-gapped environments.

Contact sales@jasperfx.net for Enterprise pricing.

License Configuration

Once you have a license key, configure it in your CritterWatch server's appsettings.json:

{
  "JasperFx": {
    "LicenseKey": "YOUR-LICENSE-KEY-HERE"
  }
}

Or via environment variable:

JASPERFX__LICENSEKEY=YOUR-LICENSE-KEY-HERE

The license key is validated at startup. If the key is invalid or missing for a Professional feature, those features will be disabled with a warning in the logs.

Open Source

The Wolverine.CritterWatch observer library (the NuGet package installed in monitored services) is MIT-licensed and has no license key requirement. All services can be monitored regardless of the CritterWatch server license tier.

For more information, visit the JasperFx licensing page.