Time Series Billing

Sysdig Monitor allows you to consume and store custom metrics through a flexible and cost-effective Time Series Billing model aligned with your usage. With an 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 view your account licensing, usage, and spending. Based on your current subscription tier, time-series usage, and the number of active agents, you can estimate your Sysdig time series consumption costs and take further actions. Time Series Billing works only in SaaS environments and is not currently available in on-prem environments.

See How Time Series Databases Work to learn more about time series and how promQL works with time series.

Benefits of Time Series Billing

Flexible time series billing allows you to consume as much time series as is necessary for your environment. Time series billing is applicable to “custom” time series, ingested via the following means:

See Use Cases for more details.

For more information understanding and controlling metric usage, including dropping time series that is not required see Control Time Series Ingestion.

Billing Custom Time Series

Sysdig calculates the time series ingestion overage price in the following way:

  1. Total custom time series consumption is metered for each hour.
  2. The consumption is compared against the custom time series entitlement for that hour, based on the subscription.
  3. The custom time series ingestion overage for the hour is calculated as the difference between the total hourly consumption and the entitlement.
  4. Each calendar month’s bill is calculated based on the 95th percentile of all hourly time series ingestion overages during that month.

Consuming Custom Time Series

Sysdig meters the following types of custom metrics ingested by the Sysdig agent:

  • Prometheus (including Monitor Integrations and custom Prometheus jobs)
  • JMX
  • App Checks
  • statsd

In addition, all metrics and metadata ingested via Prometheus Remote Write and cloud platform metrics are metered against custom time series.

Metrics which do not fall into one of the above categories, such Kube State Metrics (KSM) and container metrics, are not considered custom metrics and thus not counted against custom time series entitlements.

Time Series Entitlement

Custom time series consumption is calculated against the reserved time series included as an entitlement with your subscription. The basic Sysdig Monitor plan includes a 2,000 time series entitlement per agent per hour. You can purchase more by adding on-demand agents or time series packs.

Reserved time series is the number of custom time series per hour, a user is entitled to via the Sysdig subscription. The total value of entitled time series per account (for each hour) is calculated as (the number of reserved agents + the number of connected on-demand agents during that hour) * the number of time series per agent.

Time series consumed beyond your subscription entitlement is aggregated across all agents running in your environment. For example, if you have two agents running, you can consume 3,000 metrics on one agent and 1,000 on another, for a total of 4,000 TS, without incurring additional charges (based on the default entitlement of 2,000 TS per agent).

The default time series entitlement of 2,000 time series is applicable only to custom metrics. Metrics which do not fall into the custom metric category, such Kube State Metrics (KSM) and container metrics, are not considered custom metrics and thus not counted against custom time series entitlements.

Time Series Entitlement Example

Let’s assume that your Sysdig Monitor subscription includes 15 total Sysdig reserved agents. Each one of those agents is entitled to 2,000 custom time series per hour. To determine the total maximum time series for an account, multiply the number of agents by the time series entitlement per agent – 15 * 2,000 = 30,000 – which means that the account is entitled to consume 30,000 custom time series per hour aggregated across all agents. Any one agent can consume greater than the 2,000 entitlement as long as the maximum for all agents does not exceed the account entitlements (in this example, 30,000).

Any time series consumed beyond your entitlement will be charged an overage charge. Additional time series packs can be purchased to increase your overall maximum time series entitlement.

Contact Sales to purchase time series packs to extend your subscription entitlement.

Time Series Packs

Time series packs are available to purchase to increase your custom time series entitlements per Account. A time series pack includes 1,000 time series and is charged per month.

Using the above example, if you purchase ten time series packs consisting of 1,000 time series per pack, you will increase the default time series in your account from 30,000 to 40,000. This will entitle you to consume 10,000 more metrics across all of the Sysdig agents.

View Your Subscription

Time Series Visualization

To help you visualize and better understand custom time series consumption, Sysdig provides at-a-glance visualization of the following:

  • Subscription Details:

  • Reserved: The number of reserved agents available. See Reserved Time Series.

  • Agents - Current Usage: The number of agents currently deployed. From here you can click the Agent Dashboard link to view individual time series consumption by agent, metrics type, etc.

  • Time Series - Previous Hour: The total number of time series consumed across all agents in the previous hour. You will see the total custom series entitlement and time series usage against your entitled amount, along with any time series overage beyond your entitlement.

    • From here you can click the Time Series Dashboard to view details on the total time series consumption for your account.
    • Also you can use the menu to download a CSV file with your hourly usages. See Download Usage.

Edit Subscription

  1. On the Subscription page, under Agent - Current Usage, click the three dots to the right of the Agent Dashboard link.

  2. Click Change On Demand Agents.

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 via the Time Series Dashboard:

  • 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 maximum of the 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

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 to discover and analyze trends on where time series is coming from. The dashboard shows the total number of time series; top hosts by time series ingestion, 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.

For example, 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

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

Time Series Billing Example

Time series billing is calculated per month. A basic subscription will provide you 2,000 time series per agent. This entitlement 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 in your environment with the following consumption details:

  • Entitled number of time series per hour (reserved agents * 2,000): 3 * 2,000 = 6,000
  • Actual time series consumed by all agents = 7000
  • Any overage is calculated by subtracting the total entitlement value from the actual consumption value, in this case (7,000 - 6,000) = 1,000. This account would be charged over overage of 1,000 time series.

Control Time Series Ingestion

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

Use Cases

On-Demand Time Series Consumption

Let’s say you have a Sysdig Monitor account which primarily consumes metrics from downstream Prometheus servers via Prometheus Remote Write. As such, you have only licensed the account for one Sysdig Agent, which entitles your account to 2,000 time series.

Assuming the following volume examples:

  • Two Prometheus Servers sending metrics to Sysdig via Remote Write
  • Prometheus Server 1 generates 50,000 time series consistently every hour during a month
  • Prometheus Server 2 generates 150,000 time series consistently every hour during a month
  • One Sysdig agent which collects 1,000 time series consistently every hour during a month

The time series billing for the month is calculated as follows:

  • Time series usage is the same for every hour: Total custom time series consumed - Subscription entitlement (50,000 + 150,000 + 1,000) - 2,000 = 199,000

On-demand time series pricing is measured in blocks of 1,000 time series per month. To determine the amount of on-demand time series you will be billed for, divide the total time series usage from the above calculation and divide by 1,000:

  • The number of on-demand units consumed = (199,000 / 1,000) = 199

If the time series on-demand price is $7.5 for up to one unit of 1,000 time series, the total monthly cost for this use case = $7.5 * 199 = $1592.50 per month.

Metric Packs Time Series Consumption

Extending the above example, we can see how purchasing individual time series packs will extend your time series entitlement.

  • Two Prometheus Servers
  • Prometheus Server 1 generates 50,000 time series
  • Prometheus Server 2 generates 150,000 time series
  • One Sysdig agent that collects 1,000 time series
  • 100 pre-purchased time series packs, which is equivalent to 100,000 time series

The billing for the month is calculated as follows:

  • Total subscription capacity: (Total time series consumption - (time series entitlement from time series pack + subscription entitlement)) (50,000 + 150,000 + 1,000) - (100,000 + 2,000) = 99,000

Pre-purchased time series packs also entitle you to 1,000 time series per month per pack.

If the pre-purchase price for time series packs is $5 ($2.50 less per 1,000 time series than the on-demand usage price), and you’ve purchased 100 packs, that brings your pre-purchase time series entitlement cost to $500 per month.

To calculate your overall monthly cost, you would determine the total time series entitlement subtracted from the total time series consumed, then include the amount already paid for in pre-paid time series packs. Any resulting time series overage beyond the included entitlement plus the pre-purchased time series pack entitlement would be billed at the on-demand rate of $7.50 for each 1,000 time series block.

  • Total number of time series consumed = (50,000 + 150,000 + 1,000) = 201,000

  • Total time series entitlement: (100,000 + 2,000) = 102,000

  • Time series overage: (201,000 - 102,000) = 99,000

  • On-demand time series cost: (99,000 / 1,000) * 7.50 = $742.50 (we would be purchasing 99 1,000 packs of on-demand time series as the overage above what is already covered by our entitlement)

  • Total monthly time series cost = Cost of pre-purchased time series packs + cost of total overage: ($500 + $742.50) = $1,242.50