So in my case I have a CHR with a p1 license running on AWS for more than a year now. Unfortunately someone changed something on the DNS server which caused the CHR to be unable to verify the license status.In '/system license' menu router will indicate the time next-renewal-at when it will attempt to contact server located on licence.mikrotik.com. Communication attempts will be performed once an hour after the date on next-renewal-at and will not cease until the server responds with an error. If deadline-at date is reached without successfully contacting the account server, the router will consider that license has expired and will disallow further software updates. However, router will continue to work with the same license tier as before.
So when people started complaining about packet loss and other random issues it took me a while to discover the licenses was now listed as "free" instead of p1. This of course limited the throughput quite a bit, and luckily it was easily fixed after fixing the DNS issue and doing a manual license renewal. So even though this behavior is to be expected (it seems like a logical result to me), it's not what is indicated in the manual. Unless "continue to work with the same license tier as before" means the license tier before the one you have now or something.
Can someone confirm the revert to free is indeed the expected behavior (as this would confirm the dns problem was indeed what caused my problem)?
Bonus question: What would be the best way to monitor this? is there an snmp oid value I can set an alert on or something?