Understand metric quotas and pools

Metric quotas assign specific percentages of your total persisted writes limit to pools of metrics. A pool might translate to teams or other logical groupings within your organization.

Use metric quotas to give each pool a specific quota of your total persisted writes license, expressed either as a percentage or a value in Data Points Per Second (DPPS).

If a metric, single service, pod, or environment begins to emit a high volume of data that pushes the system over its persisted writes limit, a penalty applies to the pool containing the emitted metric. Pools that haven’t exceeded their quota aren’t penalized.

Metrics within a pool are guaranteed at least the defined percentage of system writes at all times. Individual pool quotas must sum to less than or equal to the capacity limit. If your entire Chronosphere Observability Platform tenant is under the capacity limit, an individual pool can exceed its defined quota without incurring a penalty, and Observability Platform allocates the remaining capacity to the Default Pool.

An exception to this behavior is pool thresholds, which let you strictly enforce data limits on certain pools when they exceed defined values, independent of pool allocations. Pool thresholds are a proactive tool to limit series in strictly enforced pools. These limits prevent series from consuming portions of the overall cardinality budget and inadvertently affecting pools that haven’t exceeded their allocation. Defining thresholds means that drops can occur, even if your pool allocation or overall license aren’t exceeded.

View and manage pools

View existing metric pools in Observability Platform on the Metrics Quotas page. If you haven’t configured any metric pools, Observability Platform shows a single Default Pool.

You can also use the Metrics Live Telemetry Analyzer to view the metrics that each pool contains, and filter by priority.

You can then manage pools to shape and plan your pool sizes, and plan for future usage.