Viewing data usage and billing

The following table outlines various charts that display the data consumption of metrics on the Account & billing dashboard in the Instana UI.

You can use any of the following filters to display the data used for metrics:

• Environment selector
• Time frame
• Presentation

The charts display the data date-wise when you select any time frame filter, except for Last 7 days for which the charts display data hourly. Standard and Essential charts display the average value of that time frame. The Data usage chart displays the total amount of ingested data and its type during that time frame. The total amount is the sum of the data that is ingested through infrastructure, tracing, synthetics, EUM mobile, and EUM website. You can review the individual amount to understand which type of data contributes to your total amount. All values are rounded to the nearest integer.

The Cumulated values filter is only available when you select This Month or Last Month time frames. When you select the Cumulated values filter, the values are added over the time frame. Both This Month and Last Month time frames align with the billing period. Therefore, the value at the end of the month matches your consumption of that resource for the month.

Furthermore, when you select This Month, an additional calculated Trendline is displayed, which displays the total actual data usage for the month. Trendline helps you understand the amount of data usage you can expect until the end of the month.

If you select All paid units (aggregated) to display all paid units, the charts display a red line to indicate the allowed data consumption, if applicable.

For Standard and Essential MVS charts, the cumulated view displays how MVS usage adds up over a month. This chart calculates usage in MVS-month units based on the duration of MVS that are active during the billing period.

The following example shows how MVS is calculated:

• If 10 MVS are active on 1 June, the usage that is displayed for that day is 0.33 MVS-months (10 MVS ÷ 30 days in June).

• If the same 10 MVS remains active for 10 days, the total usage displayed is 3.33 MVS-months (0.33 MVS * 10 days by 10 June).

The following table outlines the calculation of MVS for each day:

The cumulated view provides you a comprehensive understanding of your MVS usage over the month. It helps you track the actual usage against your entitlements, which allows you to identify any on-demand usage.

The Consumption Overview table displays data ingestion details for the past 13 months in agreement with the data ingestion policy. The monthly data ingests are measured in GB. You can view and track the total monthly consumption of data ingest, consumption trends, and overage through the Consumption Overview table.

To view the data consumption across all units of your account with a paid license, complete the following steps:

1. From the navigation menu in the Instana UI, select Account & billing.
2. Click Usage > Consumption overview.
3. Optional: To download the data consumption report, click Export to CSV.

The following image displays the Consumer Overview table in the Instana UI:

The Data granularity section provides a comprehensive view of data ingestion across a specific tenant unit in Instana that helps you analyze how different ingestion types contribute to overall usage, with percentage-based insights.

Ingestion type breakdown

To help you find the sources and scale of data ingestion within a tenant unit, Instana categorizes ingestion into three key types: Tracing, End User Monitoring (EUM), and Synthetics.

Tracing

You can view the top 10 services contributing to trace data. The contribution of each service is displayed in percentage of the total trace ingestion within the selected time range. When you click View details for a specific service, then you can view top 10 endpoints of that service. Each endpoint represents as a percentage of that service’s trace volume.

EUM for websites and mobile applications

You can view the top 10 contributing websites to EUM website data ingestion, and the top 10 mobile applications contributing to EUM mobile data ingestion. Each entry displays its percentage contribution relative to the total EUM usage within the tenant unit, providing a clear overview of the most impactful sources.

Synthetics

You can view the top 10 synthetic test names contributing to synthetic data ingestion. Each test’s contribution is shown as a percentage of total synthetic usage in the tenant unit.

How do I determine percentages?

Navigation and interaction

When you click any item, such as service, endpoint, website or application, or synthetic test, then you can view the related detailed metrics and performance insights on the Summary tab.

Time range selection

You can filter the result based on the following time periods:

• Last 7 days
• Last month
• This month

The percentages that are displayed in the Percentage of usage column represent the share of ingestion for each item within the total ingestion volume for that time range.

Multi-tenant visibility

You can click the Switch tenant link to view granular ingestion data across different tenant units.

Purpose

Data granularity helps you to identify high-volume contributors to data ingestion, understand ingestion patterns, and make informed decisions regarding observability and data control.

Various sources send compressed observability data over the network to the Instana backend. The backend decompresses and processes this data and then measures the uncompressed data in its raw state.

Instana collects data from the following sources:

• Tracing: Each trace contains multiple spans, which are the basic units of tracing data. Instana measures each span each independently, and the total trace size equals the sum of its spans.
• Infrastructure: Monitors metrics like CPU, memory, and network usage. The size is based on the frequency and volume of the collected metrics.
• EUM (end user monitoring): Measures data collected from the real-user sessions, and the measuring size is based on the number of interactions and session duration.
• Synthetics: Measured by the size of each test payload, for example, browser or API tests. The total size of all tests is aggregated over time.