Usage, retention and quotas
Orbit Pulse lets you decide how long a project keeps its telemetry and how much it may take in each day. This page is for project administrators who set these limits and for anyone who wants to know why records were rejected.
Every project role can read the Usage page. Only project administrators change retention and quotas.
Set retention for a project
Section titled “Set retention for a project”Retention is set per project in the project’s settings, in days, and expired rows are removed automatically. Today a project can keep data from 1 to 365 days. Once plans launch, your plan sets Pulse data retention; see Pricing.
- Searches are limited to the retention window.
- A record outside the window is rejected at intake and counted as rejected.
- Session recordings and real user monitoring data follow the project’s retention too.
Retention is separate from trace retention, which decides which traces are kept inside that window. See APM, traces and the service map.
Set daily quotas
Section titled “Set daily quotas”A quota caps the records a project accepts per UTC day, across all its ingest keys. Set it on the Usage page or in the project settings.
| Setting | Values |
|---|---|
| Log records per day | 1 to 1 trillion, or no quota |
| Spans per day | 1 to 1 trillion, or no quota |
| Warning share | 50% to 99%. The default is 80%. |
When you set a quota, Pulse first counts the records already stored today, so a new quota does not start from zero. A change applies to intake at once.
What happens when a quota is crossed
Section titled “What happens when a quota is crossed”Pulse keeps the records that fit and rejects the rest. Rejected records are never queued. The sender is told:
- OTLP answers
200with apartialSuccessobject and the reason. - JSON log intake answers
202with the count inrejectedand the reason inquota.
Daily log quota of 10,000 log records reached: 250 log records rejected until 00:00 UTCPulse also notifies the project’s administrators in Orbit, with a link to Usage. There is one notification per signal, day and level: when accepted records first reach the warning share, and when the first record is rejected. The other Pulse views show a banner while a quota is near or reached.
Logs dropped by an exclusion filter do not count against the quota. Spans that real user monitoring stores for browser requests do.
Read the Usage page
Section titled “Read the Usage page”Open Usage in Pulse for the project.
- Today’s meters for log records and spans against their quotas, each marked Within quota, Near the quota or Quota reached.
- Metric series started today against the project’s daily series limit; see Metrics, dashboards and SLOs.
- Stored records per day for today, 7 or 30 days, as bar charts with rejected records in red, or as a table. Late data counts on its own day.
- The services that send the most, with links to their logs and APM.
- Quota events: the warnings and the first rejections.
Per-key limits are separate. Each ingest key has its own records-per-minute budget and body size limit; see Send your first logs.
Plan limits Planned
Section titled “Plan limits ”The plan catalogue below is the one planned for launch. It may change before launch. See Pricing for every plan limit.
| Plan | Pulse data retention | Daily intake |
|---|---|---|
| Free | 3 days | 100 MB |
| Team | 15 days | 2 GB |
| Business | 30 days | 10 GB |
| Enterprise | Set by contract | Set by contract |
Daily intake protects the service and is not billed. Pulse data will also count toward the single storage quota of the organization, measured as compressed size. See Quotas and limits.