When ingesting typical metrics payloads with supported metrics source types (collectd_http, statsd, metrics_csv), a metrics index requires about 50% less disk storage space compared to storing the same payload in an events index.

Consider the following when deciding whether to scale horizontally by adding additional indexers.

Using the collectd_http source type with an HTTP Event Collector (HEC) input, testing reached a constant of around 55,000 events per second maximum ingestion throughput, and around 58,000 events per second without additional search load.

Using the statsd source type with a UDP input, throughput was highly variable depending on other network activity. For UDP inputs we recommend using a universal forwarder as close as possible to where metrics are collected.

Consider the results from the following test for running metrics queries. This test used metrics from 1,000 hosts, with a total event count of 6 billion events in the metrics index, where queries were representative and did not use wildcards in metric_name.