Modify Metric Data Retention Periods

You can modify the default metric data retention periods, which control how long data is retained at 1-minute, 10-minute, and 1-hour resolution. See Metric Data Resolution over Time.

There are a few important points to note before changing metric data retention periods:

Setting longer retention periods for metric data can quickly and significantly affect database size and Controller performance.

  • If you need to review details for an issue that occurred during a period for which you have only 10-minute or 1-hour data, Splunk AppDynamics provides access to diagnostic data at a more detailed level than might be visible on a graph, so increasing the default retention periods is not often necessary.
  • While metric retention periods apply to the data kept in the Controller database, some of the data that appears in the Controller UI — in particular, data at the 1 and 10-minute granularity level that appears in the tier and application dashboards — is fetched from the Controller cache rather than from the database. If you set the 1 and 10-minute metric retention periods to an overall retention period that exceeds the cache retention period, the performance of the Controller UI will be adversely affected. This is because the Controller has to retrieve the data from the database rather than from the cache. The cache retention period is determined by the caches.retention.period setting, which you can modify in the Administration Console.
  • Changing the data retention periods in the Controller settings does not affect the values shown as time ranges in the Controller UI.
Change Data Retention Period

To change the data retention period for metrics:

  1. Log in to the Administration Console.

  2. Click Controller Settings.

  3. Change the data retention period by modifying the values for the following settings:
    Property NameAbout the PropertyDeafult
    appdynamics.controller.sim.purge.machine.using.metricEnable purging using only metadata information. Purging in this method does not use metrics data.false

    metrics.min.retention.period

    The number of hours 1-minute data is retained. This value should always be less than the value for metrics.ten.min.retention.period

    4 hours

    metrics.ten.min.retention.period

    The number of hours 10-minute data is retained. This value should always be greater than the value for metrics.min.retention.period and less than metrics.retention.period

    48 hours

    metrics.retention.period

    The number of days 1-hour data is retained. This value should always be greater than the value for metrics.ten.min.retention.period

    365 days

    purger.bts.shortlived.expected.baselineThe expected number of short-lived business transactions to be purged in one purging attempt.100
    purger.metrics.shortlived.expected.baselineThe number of entities the short-lived metric purger expects to be purged on every purging attempt.1000
    shortlived.metric.purger.time.interval.in.minThe interval frequency in minutes for the short-lived stale metric purger timer task to run.30
    shortlived.metric.purging.enabledEnable the short-lived metric purger. When set to true, the short-lived metric purger timer task purges all stale metrics which are short-lived. For example, container metrics.true
    shortlived.stale.metric.duration.in.hoursThe duration of data in an hour, in which a metric that has not reported any data, is considered stale.

    2

  4. Click Save.

For example, if you change the metrics.min.retention.period property to 3, metric data displayed for all time ranges less than or equal to 3 hours are shown at one-minute resolution. Metric data for time ranges greater than 3 hours and less than metrics.ten.min.retention are shown at 10-minute resolution, and metric data for older time ranges are shown at 1-hour resolution.

As another example, if you change metrics.ten.min.retention to 72, all the time ranges less than or equal to 72 hours (3 days), and greater or equal to min.retention.period are displayed at 10-minute resolution.