Licensing concepts

Chronosphere uses the following terms when describing licensing concepts in Chronosphere Observability Platform.

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.

Metric license types

Observability Platform defines two types of metric licenses: the Standard Metrics License and Histogram Metrics License.

Standard Metrics License

The Standard Metrics License measures aggregations, persisted writes, and persisted cardinality license consumption for the following Observability Platform metric types:

Cumulative counter
Delta counter
Gauge

Because Observability Platform aggregates and persists legacy Prometheus histograms and OpenTelemetry explicit bucket layout histograms as cumulative or delta counters, these metrics consume Standard Metrics License capacity.

Histogram Metrics License

The Observability Platform histogram metric type supports both OpenTelemetry exponential histograms and Prometheus native histograms.

The Histogram Metrics License measures aggregations, persisted writes, and persisted cardinality license consumption for the following Observability Platform metric types:

Cumulative exponential histogram
Delta exponential histogram

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 Observability Platform 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.

If your organization exceeds 100% of their Matched Writes Capacity Limit, data that would otherwise match aggregation rules is dropped. The data that drops depends on your metric pool allocations, and the priority set for each pool.

Persisted writes

The number of persisted writes to the Observability Platform database consists of the following:

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

If you exceed 100% of your Persisted Writes Capacity limit, data points might be dropped.

Quotas determine the data which drops first. 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, Observability Platform 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 Observability Platform in the last 2.5 hours.

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

If your organization exceeds 100% of their Persisted Cardinality Capacity Limit, data points for any new time series not seen in the last 2.5 hours will be dropped until you're below the limit. Data points for existing time series will continue to be persisted.

Capacity limits

Capacity limits indicate your maximum license capacity for metrics data in Observability Platform. 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 Observability Platform 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.

Pulumi provider Service discovery