Before Starting

Warning: Increasing the retention periods for the settings for incident, event data, and transaction snapshots can significantly affect Controller performance and disk consumption. We recommend recording your current retention settings before editing the default values if you need to roll back modified settings.

It is important to be cautious when modifying these settings. For example, cutting the default value of metrics.min.retention.period in half reduces the disk space required to keep metrics at the one minute level of granularity. However, doubling the default value can double the amount of disk space consumed by that type of metric.

The Administration Console imposes allowed values in the input fields for metric retention settings based on theoretical limits regardless of the actual capacity of the current machine. For a given deployment, practical limits for the settings depend on hardware resources available to your Controller, application activity, features being used, and other factors.

The Controller machine sizing guidelines assume that default values are used for retention settings. Therefore, increasing default values can affect the assumption on which those guidelines are based. Increasing the retention settings, even within the allowed values in the UI, can have adverse effects on performance or can result in disk space exhaustion.

Warning: We recommend that you monitor your system carefully if you change any of these settings from the default, and be prepared to roll back your changes if necessary.