ARTIFACTORY: How to debug the "You have reached the permitted limit of the number of projects that can be created" error

Description:
When attempting to create a new project, users may receive a message saying that the allowable maximum of projects has been reached, even when the project limit granted for the subscription type has not been reached. 



Typical symptoms of this behavior include the following:

• The “Create New” project button is grayed out and attempts to create a new project via REST API result in the aforementioned error message.
• The UI's "Used/Allocated Projects" section (under Dashboard Topology) displays an illogical limit, such as 1/0 projects allocated. 

• The value of the license.projects.total property in the config_key column in the access_platform_config table will usually show a value of 0 (or any other number that does not correspond to the actual expected limit). For example: 

Mitigation steps:

This behavior usually occurs when there is a duplicate Artifactory license used across more than one JPD. To determine whether or not this is the case, the following steps should be followed:

The warning will indicate which license is duplicated across the JPDs.

2. The warning displays the hash of the duplicate license. The license hashes can be viewed under Administration → License Details → Licenses. The licenses on each JPD can be also compared by reviewing the $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/etc/artifactory/artifactory.cluster.license (for HA clusters) and $JFROG_HOME/artifactory/etc/artifactory/artifactory.lic (for a single node setup) files on each JPD in order to identify the duplicate license key. 

Note: it may take a few minutes for MC to acknowledge that the licenses have been updated. In some cases, a restart of the JPD may be required to update the changes.