The live archives feature offers long-term storage of log data that you don't intend to query often, for a lower storage cost, plus an additional cost for queries against that data. Live archives is available to full platform users. The live archives feature includes the following three billing factors:
- Data ingest: Data ingest is billed only once for logs, whether they are stored in live archives or not. There are no additional data ingest costs for logs that are stored in live archives.
- Compute: You will receive a bill based on Compute Capacity Units depending on your queries of live archives data.
- Storage: This is governed by a unit of measure, GB Months, which is described below.
Tip
To use and be billed for live archives, make sure you're on a usage-based pricing model. In addition to users and data, live archives is also metered in GB Months and Compute Capacity Units.
What counts as live archives storage?
In the context of the New Relic pricing plan, live archives storage is a measurement of the data stored for an extended period, live archive retention, on top of, and in addition to, data retention set for all of your logs data, or regular data retention.
Together, the live archive retention period added to the regular data retention period is the total retention. The regular data retention period for logs includes both the default retention period (30 days for the Original Data option, 120 days for Data Plus), as well as any additional days of retention (“extended retention”).
For example, when a customer has three months of regular data retention for logs and sets nine months of total retention for logs in live archives, the live archive retention is as follows:
Important
A GB Month is a measurement of the volume of data and length of time stored by the Products for the benefit of the Customer, including from the Software, the Customer Properties, or Third-Party Services. GB Months also includes telemetry data from preview or pre-release versions of software. For more details, see our definitions.
How do we calculate storage?
When you purchase the add-on Live Archives, we measure storage in GB Months. GB Months are calculated for each day.
We count how many bytes were stored in live archives as of the end of a given day (UTC). To count bytes stored in live archives, we sum the GB Ingested for (total retention - regular data retention) days, starting from total retention days ago, moving forward in time. Then, we divide that number of bytes by the number of days in the month. To get the total GB Months for one month, we can then just add up the GB Months for the days of that month.
Example: Let's say a customer has configured 60 days of total retention for logs, with 30 days of regular data retention. That means a log spends the last 30 days of those 60 days in live archives storage and after the total 60 days, the log expires from live archives and is no longer retained. If the customer has been collecting data for several months, at a steady 1 GB/day of logs ingested, 30 GB will reside in regular logs storage and 30 GB more will reside in live archives. Each day, one GB is ingested into standard storage and one new GB expires from live archives and is deleted.
For the purposes of this example, in month 9 we would:
- Count the 30 GB stored in live archives, and
- Since month 9 is 30 days long, record 1 GB Months (30 GB/30 days) of storage usage for on the 1st.
- Repeat this same measurement for each day of month 9, since the “bucket” of 30 days of Live Archives remains full with 30 GB for the entire month.
Adding up all the days' measurements, each of 1 GB Month, gives a total of 30 GB Months by Oct 1. Therefore, this customer has used 30 GB Months of storage for the month of September.
Other calculation details
Here are some additional aspects of our calculation:
- In the context of our pricing model, a GB is defined as 1 billion bytes.
- Monthly live archives storage (GB Months) is rounded up to the nearest integer. For example, if your organization uses 99.9 GB Months during a month, that's counted as 100 GB Months.
- Retention for a given day of usage rating is considered to be the last value set for the UTC day. Applies to both regular data retention and live archives storage.
- Timestamp from when data enters usage pipeline is used to calculate usage, not the logs timestamp or back- or forward-dated event timestamp.