Infrastructure Monitoring billing (Host and metric plans)

Manage your costs and billing in Infrastructure Monitoring

Note: Read this document if your organization’s subscription plan is based on the number of hosts or metrics you’re monitoring with Infrastructure Monitoring. If your usage plan is based on the rate at which you send data points to Infrastructure Monitoring (DPM), see Infrastructure Monitoring subscription usage (DPM plans).This topic describes general aspects of your usage and consumption. For more detailed billing-related queries, contact your Splunk Account Team.

When you exceed your subscription limits for a sustained period of time during a monthly usage period, Splunk Observability Cloud might charge overage fees to your organization.

For information on system limits, see Per product system limits in Splunk Observability Cloud.

How to calculate monthly usage

The number of hosts, containers, and other resources that Infrastructure Monitoring monitors can fluctuate significantly over the course of a month. For this reason, Splunk Observability Cloud calculates monthly usage by using averages.

  • To calculate monthly usage for hosts and containers, Splunk Observability Cloud counts the number of unique hosts and containers sending metrics during each hour in the month. It then calculates the average of these counts to determine monthly usage.

  • To calculate monthly usage for custom and high-resolution metrics, Splunk Observability Cloud counts the number of metric time series (MTS) sent during each hour in the month. It then calculates the average of these counts to determine monthly usage. For details on the difference between metrics and Metric Time Series, see Metrics, data points, and metric time series in Splunk Observability Cloud.

Overage fees apply to each type of object individually.

Example

Let’s suppose that your subscription plan covers 25 hosts and 10 containers per host, or 250 containers.

Let’s also suppose that you are over your limits as follows:

  • Hosts: 35, or 10 hosts more than the subscription limit of 25.

  • Containers: 300, or 50 containers more than the subscription limit of 250.

In this case, Splunk Observability Cloud charges overage fees for 10 hosts and for 50 containers.

However, paying the overage fee for 10 hosts doesn’t automatically add 100 containers to your subscription limit and accommodate for the 50 additional containers. You must add 10 hosts to your subscription plan, as discussed in How to avoid overage fees, to add support for an additional 100 containers.

Overage fees can be as high as 150% of the monthly list price for each element for which you are over your plan’s limit.

Create a detector to receive alerts about subscription limits

To help avoid overage fees, create a detector to proactively monitor for potential overages and receive alerts when you are nearing a subscription limit.

When creating the detector, you can use these metrics as signals on the Alert signal tab.

Item to alert on

Metric to use as the detector signal

Hosts

sf.org.numResourcesMonitored, filtered on the dimension resourceType:host

Containers

sf.org.numResourcesMonitored, filtered on the dimension resourceType:container

Custom metrics

sf.org.numCustomMetrics

Also, consider using one of the following conditions on the Alert condition tab:

  • Static Threshold condition: Set the threshold to a relatively high percentage of your limit.

  • Resource Running Out condition: In Alert settings, set Capacity to your limit. In Alert settings, select Show advanced settings, set the Double EWMA option to Yes.

How to avoid overage fees

If you are approaching or over your limit in any area, you have a few options available to avoid overage fees:

  • Monitor fewer hosts, send in fewer custom metrics, and so on.

  • Reevaluate the size of your subscription, increasing your limits to match your need for hosts, containers, or custom metrics.

  • If you have Enterprise Edition, you can manage costs associated with sending in data by setting limits on access tokens. See Manage data ingest using access tokens for more information.

  • If you have a Standard Edition pricing plan, you can upgrade your subscription to Enterprise Edition, which includes support for monitoring more containers and custom metrics per host.

  • Purchase support to increase your limits on any of these items.

  • Consider archiving your MTS using Metrics Pipeline Management. Archived metrics cost 1/10th of real-time metrics. See more at Introduction to metrics pipeline management.

To get help with understanding which option is best for your organization, contact support. See Support Programs for support contact options.