Account Metrics and Limiting

• What happens if I go over the limits of my plan?

  If your metric limits go over the allowed number of metrics for your plan, we’ll send you a friendly reminder to ask you to either delete metrics or upgrade to the next plan.

  If your account is still over the allotted number of metrics for your plan after 7 days we’ll drop you a mail and your plan will be automatically upgraded. Any charges will be prorated.

• What limits are on my account?

  See the Account Limits explanation documentation for information on what limits are in place, and why.
• How do you handle bursty traffic?

  We know bursty traffic is a normal part of everyone’s operations, and we don’t want to penalize people for it. At the same time, we need to make sure we’re billing everyone fairly.

  If your account is storing more than 110% of the metrics allowed under your plan for 14 consecutive days, we’ll send you an email and display an in-account message that we’ll need to upgrade your account soon.

  If you don’t reply and if your metric usage remains above 110% of the limit, your account will be automatically upgraded to the smallest plan that your usage fits into. If that’s not suitable for you, you will need to reduce the number of metrics you’re storing. If you don’t take action or contact us within the 14 day notice period, your subscription will automatically upgrade.

  It’s worth noting that we won’t automatically upgrade any customer during the 14 day notice period and that we’re willing to bend the rules if you just need a bit more time to reduce your usage - we know technical changes can take some time - so please talk to us and we’ll be happy to work with you. Please let billing@metricfire.com know if you want to chat about this. We’d much rather be your monitoring partner than draconian enforcers of rules!

• I spin up a lot of VMs, is this going to affect my metric limits?

  We can set up a metric expiry policy for metrics you know aren’t going to last long. You can set an expiration of 7, 14, 21, or 30 days which will automatically delete a metric if it hasn’t been updated in that time. See the documentation on metric expiry for more information.

• Is there anything I should know when I’m sending data via Java?

  Yes. Java can cache DNS entries indefinitely, which causes problems when we need to replace or add servers to our system.

  Use our Java caching guide to ensure your DNS behaves like a good neighbor.

• Are queries to Graphite cached?

  Hosted Graphite uses graphite’s default cache settings of 60s for metrics, data, and rendered images. If you really need uncached results, add ‘&noCache=true’ to your query string.

• Is it possible to control the data retention policy for my account?

  Not at the moment. Graphite’s usual backend rolls up metrics and then produces an average at a different resolution, we keep unaltered data at the resolution required.