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Time Series Billing

Sysdig Monitor allows you to consume custom metrics through a flexible and cost-effective Time Series Billing model aligned with your usage. With the enhanced billing experience, you can view your time-series consumption at a glance, analyze trends, and change subscription plans if need be.

Use the Sysdig Subscription page to control your licensing, and thereby usage and spending. Based on your current subscription tier, time-series usage, and the number of active agents, you can estimate the bill and take further actions.

Time Series Billing works only in SaaS environments and is not currently available in on-prem environments.

Benefits of Time Series Billing

• You consume more than the per-agent limit because Time Series Billing accounts for the following:

  • Time series through Monitoring Integrations

    For example, Nginx and Redis.

  • Time series through Prometheus Remote Write

  • Time series through optional Pay as you Go (PAYG) and metric packs.

  See Use Cases for more details.

  Previously, the technical limit was 10K, no PAYG and metrics packs mechanisms, no system in place to bill metrics collected outside agents.

• Validate what you are being charged on, understand and control metric usage, and drop the data that is not required, either by metric or by the scope of the metric. See Control Time Series Ingestion.

• Pay as you go and metric pack.

Consume Time Series

Time series consumption is calculated by using the reserved time series included in the subscription. The basic plan includes 2000 time series per agent, and you can purchase more by adding on-demand agents or metric packs.

Sysdig meters and bills only custom metrics.

• Prometheus

• JMX

• StatsD

• App checks

Reserved Time Series

The number of time series included with the subscription. The value is calculated as (the number of reserved agents + the number of connected on-demand agents) * the number of time series per agent. Time series consumed beyond your subscription limit will be charged and is aggregated across all agents running in your environment. What it means is that you can consume 3000 metrics on an agent and 1000 on another without incurring additional charges.

Contact Sales to purchase beyond your subscription limit.

Time Series Billing limit of 2000 is applicable only to custom metrics, while Sysdig and Sysdig KSM are included at no additional charges.

Metric Pack

A metric pack includes 1000 time series and is charged per month.

View Your Subscription

Time Series Visualization

To help you so, Sysdig provides an at-a-glance visualization of the following:

• Time Series Usage

  • Reserved: See Reserved Time Series.

  • Overage: Time series ingested beyond Reserved time series is Overage.

  • Ingested: The time series that are collected, analyzed, processed for storage.

• Time Series Usage Dashboard

• Reserved and On-Demand Agents

• Agent Usage Dashboard

• Usage history in CSV format

Edit Subscription

1. On the Subscription page, under Subscription Details , click the three dots.

2. Click Edit Subscription.

   The Subscription Plan page gives you the directions to change the subscription plan.

Monitor Time Series Usage

Time Series Metrics

To help you identify the usage trends that are important to you, Sysdig provides the following metrics:

• sysdig_ts_usage: The metric reports the number of time series ingested for a user in a 20-minutes interval. The dashboard reports the 1-hour usage, which is the sum of the maximum of three 20-minute sysdig_ts_usage measurements taken in an hour. This metric can be segmented on metric categories as well.

• sysdig_ts_usage_10s: The metric reports the number of time series ingested for a user in every 10-seconds window, per host (agent), and per metric category.

Download Usage

You can download the usage report in a CSV file. On the Subscription page, under Subscription Details, click Download Usage to download a copy of the usage report. You can view the following:

• User ID

• Time

• Number of Reserved Agents

• Number of Connected On-Demand Agents

• Time Series included per agent

• Total used time series

• The ratio of used and reserved time series

Time Series Usage Dashboard

Sysdig provides a Time Series Usage Dashboard with insight into the usage data. You can view time series ingestion at a glance and discover and analyze trends. The dashboard shows the average number of active time series per host; current ingestion rate; churn percentage; and so on.

Access the Time Series Dashboard

On the Subscription page, under Usage, click Time Series Dashboard. You can view the following:

• Current 1 Hour Ingestion

• Current Ingestion from Agents

• Churn Percentage

• The average number of time series per host

• The number of time series ingested per category

• Host-level ingestion

Calculate Time Series Usage

Time series usage is calculated by using the sysdig_ts_usage metric. The metric reports the number of time series ingested for a user in an hour (sum of the maximum of three 20-minutes). For each hour, the number of time series ingested is calculated, and then the value is deducted from the number of reserved time series. This value is stored as the usage record.

An hour period is considered in order to take the churn into account. Sysdig uses the sysdig_ts_usage_10s metric to calculate the spikes caused by churns and provides you the churn percentage in the dashboard.

Sysdig uses the 95th percentile to calculate the exceeding cost of usage. At the end of the month, the 95th percentile of the total number of active series ingested per hour is calculated. Calculating the 95th percentile reduces the chances of billing you for unexpected spikes causes by churns.

Churn Rate

When a time series stops receiving new data points, it becomes inactive. This event is called time series churn. It occurs more often during an upgrade in a Kubernetes cluster or when containers are replaced by new ones. Restarts, redeploys, dynamic workloads also cause churn and generate additional time series.

In such cases, the container_id label in a container metric changes, and subsequently, all the existing time series are replaced by new time series (with the new container_id value).

The churn rate is the number of time series that churn over time. Sysdig uses the sysdig_ts_usage_10s metric to analyze these scenarios.

The Time Series Usage Dashboard provides a ratio of time series detected at 1-hour period and 10-seconds period. This ratio is known as the churn percentage and it is expressed as this PromQL query:

(sum(sysdig_ts_usage{metric_category!='PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE'}) - sum(sysdig_ts_usage_10s)) / sum(sysdig_ts_usage{metric_category!='PROMETHEUS_REMOTE_WRITE'}) * 100

The time series collected by Prometheus Remote Write are excluded from this ratio because they are not collected by the Sysdig agent.

Example

The billing is calculated per month. A basic subscription will provide you 2000 time series per agent. This limit is applicable only to custom metrics, while you can continue consuming Sysdig and KSM metrics without incurring additional costs. Time series consumed beyond your subscription limit will be charged and is aggregated across all agents running in your environment.

For example, if you have three agents running with the following consumption:

• Agent 1 collecting 2000 time series per hour

• Agent 2 collecting 1000 time series per hour

• Agent 3 collecting 4000 time series per hour

Time series billing is calculated as follows:

Total consumption = 7000

Allowed number of time series per hour: 3 * 2000 = 6000

Effectively, you are paying only for (7000 - 6000) = 1000 because the cost is calculated on the aggregated time series consumed across all the agents running in your environment.

Control Time Series Ingestion

For more information on controlling metric usage, see the following:

• Include/Exclude Custom Metrics

• Pricing

Use Cases

Agent and Remote Write Plan

See the following example with the following configuration:

• Two Prometheus Servers

  • Prometheus Server 1 generates 50,000 time series

  • Prometheus Server 2 generates 150,000 time series

• A Sysdig agent that collects 1000 time series

• A subscription capacity of 2000 time series

The billing for the month is calculated as follows:

Time series usage: Total usage - Subscription capacity

(50,000 + 150,00 + 1000) - 2000 = 199,000

If the base price is $7.5 for up to a unit of 1K time series per month, the total base cost is calculated as follows:

The number of units consumed = (199,000 / 1000) = 199

The total cost = $7.5 * 199 = $1592.50

Agents, Remote Write, and Metric Pack Plan

See the following example with the following configuration:

• Two Prometheus Servers

  • Prometheus Server 1 generates 50,000 time series

  • Prometheus Server 2 generates 150,000 time series

• A Sysdig agent that collects 1000 time series

• 100 metric pack, which is equivalent to 100000 time series

The billing for the month is calculated as follows:

Total subscription capacity: Total usage - (subscription capacity + time series from metric pack)

201,000 - (100,000 + 2000) = 99,000

If the base price is $7.5 for up to a unit of 1K time series per month and $5 for a metric pack of 1K time series, the total base cost is calculated as follows:

The number of units consumed = (199,000 / 1000) = 199

The total cost = Cost of metric pack + cost of total usage

($7.5 * 199) + (100 * $5) = $2092.50

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About AWS Cloudwatch Licensing

In the Explore tab or Dashboards of Sysdig Monitor, the number of metrics displayed for each AWS service is limited by the number of agent licenses purchased and/or used, by region.

The license count:

• Includes Reserved agents plus On-Demand agents (even if not in use).

• Is used to determine how many AWS resources are displayed for each service in each region.

• Is not transferable between different AWS services.

AWS Service Type Priorities and Limits

For each AWS service type, services are displayed in the following priority:

• EC2: Pick instances with agents installed, then instances belonging to ECS, instance is launched before another, alphabetically by instance ID, up to license count.

• RDS: Pick by creation time, oldest instances first, up to license count.

• ELB: Pick by number of balanced instances (larger ELBs 1st), then by creation time, oldest first, up to license count.

• ElastiCache: Sort by name and display up to license count items.

• SQS: Sort queues by name and pick up to license count number of queues to fetch. Data is shown only for queues that are reporting metrics.

• DynamoDB: Sort by name and display up to license count items.

• ALB: Sort by name and display up to license count items.

For more information on AWS metrics, see AWS in the Metrics Dictionary.

Sample Use Case

Suppose you have 200 AWS instances, have purchased 100 Sysdig agent licenses, and have actually installed 50 agents.

The following limits would apply to your views of AWS services, per region:

• EC2: The 50 instances with agents installed would be shown first, then 50 more instances, first from EC2, then from ECS, then per uptime.

• RDS: 100 RDS listings would be shown, oldest first.

• ELB: 100 ELBs would be shown (largest first), then by creation time, oldest first.

• ElastiCache: 100 ElastiCache objects would be shown, alphabetically by name.

• SQS: 100 SQS queues that are reporting metrics would be shown.

• DynamoDB: 100 DynamoDBs would be shown, alphabetically by name.

• ALB: 100 ALBs would be shown, alphabetically by name.

To increase the limit of items in the AWS Services views, contact Sysdig Sales to enable additional resources depending on your license agreement.