For organizations on New Relic One pricing, our various New Relic products report a wide range of event data. Different products have different data retention periods, and different ways to extend event data retention. You can customize the length of your event data retention through flexible event retention.
Data retention UI
For how to find the data retention UI, see Manage data.
Overview of event data retention
On our original pricing model, all New Relic product subscriptions come with a certain level of data retention that governs how long different types of data are retained. One type of data governed by data retention rules is event data. Event data is available in some UI charts and tables, and also available for querying via NRQL, our querying language.
Here are some examples of how different product subscriptions can affect event data retention:
Free/Lite APM subscription: default-reported events available for 1 day. No custom events available.
Pro APM subscription: default-reported events available for 8 days. Custom events available for 1 day (and able to be extended with Insights Pro).
Extend your event retention
Product
Method
APM, Browser, and Mobile
Event data retention can be extended with a paid subscription to these products (see product data retention). To extend retention of both default-reported events and custom events further, you need an Insights Pro subscription.
This is an explanation of how the number of stored events are calculated by default for an Insights Pro subscription. (Note that with flexible retention, you have more fine-grained control over the retention period.)
The events stored is calculated based on 1) total events stored over time (calculated based on the events generated per week) and 2) the weeks of data retention available. This equation can be represented like this:
events stored = (events generated per week) * (weeks of retention)
An Insights Pro subscription provides a given number of weeks of data retention as well as a given number of events over that retention period.
For example:
(200M transactions per week) * (4 weeks of retention) = 800M events stored in Insights
(16M transactions per week) * (50 weeks of retention) = 800M events stored in Insights
For Insights Pro subscriptions, data is purged based on retention window, not volume. It is deleted from the system once it's past the retention window.
For example: If your Insights license is for 800 million events with a 4 week retention period, your data would start being purged after it is older than four weeks. Temporary spikes in data exceeding your subscription level will still be recorded, but consistent overage should be solved by upgrading your subscription level or decreasing data collected.
For customers without an Insights Pro subscription, New Relic may throttle or downsample events to a limit of not more than than 4,000 events per host per minute.
In this example, you have an Insights Pro subscription with a license for 800 million events over 4 weeks, a rate of 200 million events per week. You have APM Pro, Browser Pro, and Mobile Enterprise. A fifth week of data is added via your subscriptions, bumping you to a total of 1 billion events stored within your plan:
If you are using 975 million events, you are not over your retention.
If you are using 1.25 billion events, you are over your retention.
Tip
Owners or Admins
The Insights Data summary UI page is used to see the types of events being reported. You can also use this page to enable and disable the reporting of PageView and Transaction events.
Note: if you disable PageView or Transaction event reporting, this can affect some New Relic UI elements. You may see some empty charts on some UI pages that rely on this data.
For organizations on our original pricing model, a subscription to Insights Pro gets you access to flexible retention, which lets you define how some types of event data are retained. This lets you keep only the event data you need, for as long as you need it. You can manage your flexible retention through the UI or through our GraphQL API.
To use this feature, you must be an account Owner or data retention add-on manager for your account.
To understand how standard event data retention works, first read Event data retention.
With flexible retention, you specify the data retention for applicable event namespaces across your accounts. This gives you per-event namespace control of your data. The retention that you specify for an event namespace will be shared by all the event types under that namespace. If some namespaces are not relevant to you, you can avoid collecting their event data entirely.
You can control data retention either in our UI or by API.
You can control data retention either using our GraphQL API or in the UI.
To do this with the UI, go to the data retention UI. Your retention changes take effect within 24 hours after updating.
To understand the terms used with flexible retention, see the following:
Term
Description
Event namespace
An event's namespace corresponds to one or more event types that share a single data retention value. For more information, see Event namespaces (types). You can also use NerdGraph to get the list of customizable event namespaces.
Retention value
The number (in days) that specifies how long your event data is stored.
Retention rule
The event namespace and retention value pair that you specify to override the current retention.
Licensed retention
Retention period that’s determined in weeks by your Insights Pro subscription contract.
Retention period for which your data is stored and is charged under the Insights Pro subscription. By default, your licensed retention determines this value but Flexible retention lets you override it.
Default retention
Retention period that comes out of the box. This is based on the total of included retention plus licensed retention.
For information on managing retention settings using APIs, see Manage data retention.
