Retention Policies

Overview

Retention policies control how long Monitoring stores metric, log, and flow data. Longer retention enables deeper historical analysis and incident review; shorter retention reduces storage costs. Downsampled metric retention provides long-term trend data at a fraction of the storage cost of raw metrics.

Administrator Access Required — This operation requires the admin role. Contact your Polystack administrator if you do not have sufficient permissions.

Prerequisites

Administrator credentials with the admin role
Confirmation from compliance and operations teams on required retention periods before reducing existing values

Recommended Retention Settings

Data Type	Recommended Retention	Storage Impact	Notes
Metrics (raw, 30s resolution)	30 days	~2 GB per node per month	Full resolution for recent incidents
Metrics (5-min downsampled)	1 year	~200 MB per node per month	Medium-term trend analysis
Metrics (1-hour downsampled)	3 years	~20 MB per node per month	Long-term capacity planning
Logs	90 days	Varies by log verbosity	Incident review and audit
Flow data	30 days	~5 GB per Gbps per month	Network forensics

Configuring Retention

Dashboard
CLI

Navigate to Monitor Center > Monitoring (Retention, admin view) and configure retention for each data type.

Select the data type (Metrics Raw, Metrics Downsampled, Logs, Flows)
Enter the retention duration (e.g., 30d, 90d, 1y)
Click Apply

Reducing retention periods deletes historical data immediately and irreversibly. Confirm with compliance and operations teams before shortening any retention window. Data deleted by retention policy cannot be recovered.

View current retention policies

monitoring retention list

Set raw metric retention

monitoring retention set \
  --type metrics-raw \
  --duration 30d

Set log retention

monitoring retention set \
  --type logs \
  --duration 90d

Set flow data retention

monitoring retention set \
  --type flows \
  --duration 30d

Downsampling Configuration

Downsampling aggregates raw metric points into lower-resolution summaries at configurable intervals. This enables long-term retention at a fraction of the storage cost.

Downsampling Level	Resolution	Applied After	Storage vs Raw
Level 1	5 minutes	7 days	~10× reduction
Level 2	1 hour	30 days	~120× reduction

Downsampled data retains statistical aggregates: min, max, sum, count, and average. Exact per-second values are not recoverable after the raw data retention period expires. Ensure raw retention is long enough for the typical incident investigation window.

Configure downsampling rules in Monitor Center > Monitoring (Downsampling, admin view).

Compliance Retention Requirements

For regulatory compliance, consult the following minimum retention guidelines:

Regulation	Minimum Log Retention	Notes
ISO 27001	1 year	Security events and access logs
SOC 2 Type II	1 year	Covers audit period plus review buffer
PCI DSS	1 year (3 months online)	Transaction-related system logs
HIPAA	6 years	Healthcare system access logs

Set Monitoring log retention to match your most demanding regulatory requirement. Storage cost for log data is typically dominated by verbosity — reduce log levels to WARNING on non-critical services to reduce volume without losing important events.

Next Steps

Log Collection

Control log ingestion volume by configuring which services are collected

Architecture

Understand storage layer sizing for your retention requirements

Security

Access controls for retention policy management

Troubleshooting

Diagnose storage pressure caused by high-cardinality metrics or high log volume

Core Services

Other Services

Overview

Recommended Retention Settings

Configuring Retention

Downsampling Configuration

Compliance Retention Requirements

Next Steps

Log Collection

Architecture

Security

Troubleshooting

​Overview

​Recommended Retention Settings

​Configuring Retention

​Downsampling Configuration

​Compliance Retention Requirements

​Next Steps

Log Collection

Architecture

Security

Troubleshooting

Overview

Recommended Retention Settings

Configuring Retention

Downsampling Configuration

Compliance Retention Requirements

Next Steps