Licensing concepts

Chronosphere uses the following terms when describing licensing concepts.

To track your telemetry usage against your licensing quotas, use the Chronosphere-provided, managed dashboards. For more information about each of these dashboards, see Licensing information.

Aggregations

Your license usage is determined by your database writes.

Matched writes are the number of writes per second being matched or ingested into the Chronosphere aggregation tier.

The aggregator counts the number of data points matched into each aggregator rule, whether rollup or downsampling. If a data point matches one rule, that's one matched write. If a data point matches two rules, that's two matched writes. The sum of the matched data points per rule equals the total matched writes for the aggregator.

A high level formula for this limit is:

Sum (number of data points matched per-rule)

Writes also depend on your Collector scrape interval. Reducing the scrape interval produces fewer writes, but can reduce visibility.

Persisted writes

The number of persisted writes to the Chronosphere database consists of the following:

(Number of unaggregated, raw data points written to the Chronosphere database)
+ (Number of aggregated data points written to the database)
+ (Number of non-Prometheus non-rolled up aggregated data points written to the database)

You can split the total system-persisted writes per second into quota allocations on a per-pool basis. Pools generally align with groups or teams, depending on your internal organization. Read more about configuring quotas. If you set up per-pool quotas, you can review the quotas in a dedicated dashboard.

To improve and enhance performance, stability, and features, Chronosphere adds time series to your database. These data points aren't counted against your license quota.

Persisted cardinality

Persisted cardinality is the count of unique time series of the persisted writes stored by Chronosphere in the last 2.5 hours.

To reduce your persisted cardinality, use rollup rules to downsample and aggregate metrics before they're stored.

Capacity limits

Capacity limits indicate your maximum license capacity for metrics data in Chronosphere. Exceeding your capacity limits incurs penalties, which can result in dropped metrics. Dropped metrics can affect dashboards, alerts, and other reports.

The license limit indicates your contractual system license with Chronosphere.

The capacity and license limits display in the Metrics License Consumption dashboard.

Tracing licenses

View tracing license information in the Tracing Licensed Consumption dashboard.

Retention policies

Retention policies define the amount of time Chronosphere retains telemetry data. Contact Chronosphere Support to configure the intervals used for your system. These policies might be based on your contract or license.

Metrics retention policies

To view metric retention policies:

In the navigation menu, click Go to Admin.
Select Control > Ingest Configuration.

For example, your system's retention policies might look like:

Five days for raw data, and resolutions of 15, 30, and 60 seconds.
120 days for one-minute data.
180 days for one-hour data.
1825 days for 24-hour data.

Metrics rules use the existing, configured set of intervals in rule definitions.

Change events policies

Change events have a default retention policy of 90 days. This value is fixed and can't be altered. For information about ingest limits for change events, see Change event limits.

Release notes Ingest