View and manage data retention

On the Data retention UI page, located in the data management hub, you can review and manage how long different types of data are stored. You may want shorter retention for some data types in order to protect sensitive information, or you may want longer retention (up to seven years) to be able to see and analyze data and trends over a longer period.

Extend your data retention for long-term analysis and compliance

Extending your data retention allows you to do long-term analysis, visualization, and alerting for all your metrics, events, logs, and traces across all of your sources. However, it's important to manage that data for cost, performance, and in some cases, compliance reasons. Our data management hub provides the tools you need to understand and control where your data is coming from, and adjust what's stored and for how long.

New Relic will begin enforcing data retention limits on March 31, 2023. When your data retention exceeds the stated limits, it will be returned to default or contracted data retention, as applicable, and data retention exceeding the stated or contracted limits will be purged. The impacted data includes all data ingested prior to and after March 31, 2023, including for use in dashboards, data analysis, auditing, and reporting needs.

When you adjust data retention beyond the stated limits, you'll be prompted (in the data management hub) to upgrade your retention with new billing changes to reflect your extended retention.

Tip

With our Data Plus option, you get up to an additional 90 days of retention (for most data types) and other enterprise-grade capabilities, such as longer query durations, FedRAMP and HIPAA compliance, additional security features, and more.

The Data retention UI is where you can see your data retention periods, and edit data retention. To view explanations of the table column headers, hover over a header.

Requirements

Being able to configure data retention requires Pro or Enterprise edition with billing administrator rights. Account characteristics that do not meet this criteria will block some New Relic organizations from adjusting retention on their own. If you're a Pro or Enterprise organization on a billing administrator account, and you can't edit retention, talk to your New Relic account representative.

Note that our Data Plus option provides up to an additional 90 days of retention.

Permission-related requirements for viewing and editing retention:

Newer user model:
- Setting a contract with longer data retention for your entire organization requires the Billing administration setting
- Adjusting retention within the bounds of a contract for specific types of data or for a specific account requires the Insights event retention capability
Original user model: requires the Owner role or Data Retention Manager Add-On role.

The data retention UI

The Data retention UI page is located in the Data management hub.

Default retention periods

The best way to understand your New Relic data retention is to go to the Data retention UI page. We recommend this because your organization may have edited your settings and so they might not be the default settings shown below.

This table shows the default namespace retention settings.

Data source	Namespace	Retention for original data option (days)	Retention for Data Plus (days)
APM	APM	8	98
APM	errors	8	98
Browser	Browser	8	98
Browser	Browser events	8	98
Browser	Browser JS errors	8	98
Browser	Browser page view timing	8	98
Custom events	Custom events	30	120
Logging	Logging	30	120
Infrastructure	Infrastructure processes (learn more)	8	98
Infrastructure	Infrastructure integrations (learn more)	395 (13 months)	485 (16 months)
Marker (change tracking)	Marker	395 (13 months)	485 (16 months)
Mobile	Mobile crash event trails (breadcrumb)	8	98
Mobile	Mobile exception	8	98
Mobile	Mobile general	8	98
Mobile	Mobile error	8	98
Mobile	Mobile crash	90	180
Mobile	Mobile session	90	180
Network	Flows (cloud & on-premises)	30	120
Network	SNMP (see metrics)	395	485
Network	Syslog	30	120
Serverless	Lambda	8	98
Serverless	Lambda custom	8	98
Serverless	Lambda spans	8	98
Synthetic monitoring (not editable)	Synthetic data (not editable)	395 (13 months)	395 (13 months)
Traces	Distributed traces	8	98

Retention details for assorted data types

In this section are details about a few different types of data, including some data types that have retention settings that can't be changed.

Raw dimensional metric data (the Metric data type) is aggregated (rolled up) for a few different time ranges and those aggregations are retained for different lengths of time. The raw dimensional metric data points are stored for 30 days. Any aggregated data points (aggregation starts at one-minute) are retained for 13 months.

Only the raw data ingest counts towards usage: the aggregated data does not.

Metric retention periods are not editable.

Metric timeslice data is generated by (both custom metrics and default metrics), mobile, and browser agents. A metric timeslice consists of three parts: a metric name, the segment of time the metric represents (the "timeslice"), and a numeric value (the measurement). APM, browser, and mobile agents can collect thousands of metric timeslices per minute for a variety of performance metrics, such as error rate, bandwidth usage, and garbage collection time.

Metric timeslice data is aggregated like this:

first to 1-minute rollups that are stored for 8 days

the 1-minute rollups are also added to 1-hour roll-ups that are retained for 90 days

Only the initial raw data ingest counts towards usage: the aggregated data does not.

Some key metrics are stored indefinitely. Read on to learn the key metrics by product.

Here are key metric timeslice data that is stored indefinitely:

APM	Apdex, for app server Throughput and page views Response time, plus breakdown into tiers or categories on your app's main Overview chart Page load time, plus breakdown into segments Error rate CPU usage Memory usage
Browser	Apdex, for browser Browser page load time Throughput total. After 90 days, there is no breakout by browser type, and only the combined average value is available for the time range requested.
Mobile	Crash rate: For iOS and for Android Network throughput Network response time Network error rates Interaction traces

Infrastructure monitoring downsamples your data as it's generated. All infrastructure monitoring metric data types (including metrics from on-host integrations) will display different granularity depending on the age of the data and the size of the time window. The following table illustrates when different downsampled buckets will be used, both in the infrastructure UI and for queries:

Bucket size	Used for time windows covering...	Data retained for...
Raw (5, 10 or 15 second)	0 to 59 minutes	8 days
1 minute	60 minutes to 6 hours	30 days
10 minutes	6 hours to 3 days	13 months
1 hour	3 days to 14 days	13 months
3 hours	14+ days	13 months

Edit data retention

To view and edit your retention, go to the data management hub, click Data retention, and click Edit data retention. There you'll see options for editing data retention or upgrading to Data Plus. If you don't see that, review the requirements and talk to your New Relic account representative.

Options for increasing retention:

If you haven't already, switch to Data Plus, which offers significantly longer data retention and other benefits.
For Data Plus or original data option: add data retention. 30 days of additional data retention for your organization costs $0.05 per GB ingested per month.

Important points about increasing retention:

When you enable a higher retention period, retention is increased across the board for all data types listed in the Data retention UI. It cannot be increased only for specific data types.
Once you enable a higher retention period, reducing retention for specific data sources has no impact on your billing. To learn about ways to reduce your data ingest and billing, see Manage data ingest.
When you adjust retention, it can take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Reducing retention

When you reduce the retention period for a data source, existing data of that type won't immediately disappear. That data might be visible and returned in queries for up to several weeks. We have safeguards in place to ensure you don't accidentally delete data, but this also means that reducing retention values isn't a good strategy for quickly removing data.

To learn about options for reducing data ingest, see Manage data ingest.

Delete existing data

Once telemetry data is reported to the New Relic database and available for querying, that data cannot be edited or deleted. This is a purposeful design decision that optimizes New Relic's speed and performance. Data will expire after its data retention period ends. If you want to delete data that has already been reported, contact your New Relic representative, if you have one.

Export and stream data

Organizations with Data Plus can export their data for long-term storage using their preferred tools. Features related to this include:

Manage retention via API

In addition to changing your retention settings in the UI, you can use our NerdGraph API. Some example NerdGraph requests are included below. Note that your data retention changes may take up to 24 hours to take effect.

Before using the API to adjust retention, review the rules on adjusting retention.

To list the customizable retention event names spaces for your account:

query {
  actor {
    account(id: YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID) {
      dataManagement {
        customizableRetention {
          eventNamespaces {
            namespace
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

To list active rules on an account:

query {
  actor {
    account(id: YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID) {
      dataManagement {
        eventRetentionRules {
          id
          deletedAt
          deletedById
          createdAt
          createdById
          retentionInDays
          namespace
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

To show the active rule on a specific account/namespace pair:

query {
  actor {
    account(id: YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID) {
      dataManagement {
        eventRetentionRule(namespace: "APM") {
          id
          deletedById
          deletedAt
          createdById
          createdAt
          retentionInDays
          namespace
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

To create a new rule:

mutation {
  dataManagementCreateEventRetentionRule(
    accountId: YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID
    namespace: "APM"
    retentionInDays: 8
  ) {
    id
    deletedById
    deletedAt
    createdById
    createdAt
    retentionInDays
    namespace
  }
}

If you delete a rule applied to a child account, that child account will adopt the current retention value of its parent account for the given namespace. If you delete a rule applied to a parent account, the default retention value will re-apply for the given namespace. To delete an existing rule:

mutation {
  dataManagementDeleteEventRetentionRule(
    accountId: YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID
    namespace: "APM"
  ) {
    id
    deletedById
    deletedAt
    createdById
    createdAt
    retentionInDays
    namespace
  }
}

You can specify a child account to be the template or source account, and have other destination child accounts adopt the same namespace retention values of the source child account. Note: all child accounts must be within the same parent account. To copy an existing set of retentions:

mutation {
  dataManagementCopyRetentions(
    sourceAccountId: SOURCE_ACCOUNT_ID
    destinationAccountIds: [
      DESTINATION_ACCOUNT_ID_1
      DESTINATION_ACCOUNT_ID_2
      DESTINATION_ACCOUNT_ID_3
    ]
  ) {
    success
    failure
  }
}

Success and failure will return lists of destination account IDs that were successful (or failed) in copying rules from the source account.

Account inheritance

The data retention settings of a parent account are inherited by its children accounts. In this context, a New Relic organization's first account is considered the parent account, and other accounts added to the organization inherit the settings in that account.

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Extend your data retention for long-term analysis and compliance

Tip

Requirements

The data retention UI

Default retention periods

Retention details for assorted data types

Dimensional metrics (Metric API)

Metric timeslice data (APM, browser, mobile)

Infrastructure data

Edit data retention

Reducing retention

Delete existing data

Export and stream data

Manage retention via API

List customizable retention event namespaces

List active rules on an account

Show active rule on an account/namespace pair

Create a new rule

Delete an existing rule

Copy existing child account rules to others

Account inheritance

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