# Respond to throughput-based license exceeded alerts

Throughput-based license exceeded alerts are triggered traffic exceeds the throughput limits allowed by your license.

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Some licenses limit the throughput of the engine to a certain fixed value. If the throughput limit is reached at any particular moment, the exceeding traffic is dropped and an alert is created to notify you how many packets have been dropped. The throughput limit is counted as the total throughput of all traffic handled by the engine at any one moment. All traffic is taken into consideration, regardless of type, direction, or the links used. Usually, temporary spikes in traffic trigger the messages, and the messages do not cause major problems. If you see these messages often, you should take action.

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## Steps

1. Make sure that your appliance licenses are matched to the correct elements according to the type of appliance. If the license generated with the POS code of a lower-throughput appliance is applied to a higher-throughput appliance, the throughput is needlessly limited.
2. If the hardware can handle a higher throughput than what it is licensed for, you can switch to a higher-throughput license (contact your reseller).
3. If the license throughput corresponds to the maximum throughput achievable with your hardware, you might be able to install an additional cluster node. Alternatively, you can switch to hardware with a higher maximum throughput (contact your reseller).
4. You can restrict the traffic in a more controlled way, for example, using the traffic management features of a Engine. See Getting Started with QoS for more information.