Policies

Version support policy

The Instana version support policy follows IBM Continuous Delivery Support Lifecycle Policy.

For self-hosted releases, Instana provides minimum 2-year support with an extension of 1 year. But Instana delivers fixes only to the latest release. To best serve your organizational needs, you are highly recommended to update to the latest version. In this way, you can benefit from having the latest features and resolved issues that might exist in previous releases.

Instana agents provide only six-month support from the release day because agent releases are rolled out much more frequently.

Data retention policy

Depending on the type of data, we apply varying data retentions. The following list describes for how long we are storing each data type.

• Website & Mobile App Monitoring Data: All website and Mobile App Monitoring data are kept for 7 days. A subset of website and mobile app beacons and approximate metrics are kept for 1 year.

• Application & Trace Data: All application data including traces and calls are kept for 7 days. Accurate metrics of applications, services, and endpoints are kept for 31 days. A subset of calls and traces and approximate metrics are kept for 1 year.

• Logs: All the collected logs are kept for 7 days.

• Synthetic monitoring: All synthetic test results and details are retained for 60 days.

• Infrastructure & Platforms Metric Data: Retention is defined per granularity. An appropriate granularity is picked automatically based on the selected window size.

  • 1, 5 and 10-second granularity: Kept for 24 hours
  • 1-minute granularity: Kept for 1 month
  • 5-minute granularity: Kept for 3 months
  • 1-hour granularity: Kept for at least 13 months

• Event Data: Kept for at least 13 months

• Configuration & Graph Data: Kept for the lifetime of the contract

Note: The retention policy that is mentioned here is for SaaS and as the default settings for self-hosted deployment. For more information about the retention policy for self-hosted deployment, see the following documentation: - Data retention for Self-Hosted Classic Edition (Docker) - Overwrite data retention defaults for Self-Hosted Custom Edition (Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform)

Fair use policy

IBM introduced a fair use policy statement to Instana SaaS only on 2 July 2024.

Previously, an Instana SaaS Managed Virtual Server (MVS) license included unlimited data. However, not all clients are the same, and due to advances in technology (for example, serverless, OTEL, among others) and to help ensure exceptional performance for every client, we are setting a data-ingest-based fair-use policy for Instana's MVS model.

What is the fair use policy?

This fair-use policy provides 325 GB of data ingestion per Standard SaaS MVS (former APM) and 50 GB of data ingestion per Essentials SaaS MVS (former IQM) per month. IBM allows this data to be ingested on average across all entitlements. For example, if you have 10 Standard SaaS MVS, the total amount of data by default is 3250 GB across these 10 licenses. It does not matter how much data an individual MVS ingests; customers stay within their policy as long as the total data ingested is, at most, 3250 GB.

What is the data ingest based fair use entitlement?

Data-Ingest measures the total data ingestion into Instana. This includes all types of data (Traces, Metrics, Events, Beacons, Synthetic Transaction Results, and so on), regardless of the ingestion method (Agent, OTEL, Serverless, and so on) or monitoring feature (End-User Monitoring, Synthetic Monitoring, and so on). Direct third-party logs are excluded.

How can I see how much I am using under the Fair Use Policy?

You can view the usage in the Account and Billing section.

Will the fair use policy impact me? If so, how?

Current client contracts remain with an uncapped data policy until all their contracts are renewed. The fair use policy is executed on an account level: meaning for each account, in case a customer has one or multiple contracts, all contracts must contain the new part numbers and the new service description.

An example for clarification follows. You have 2 environments under one tenant in your account:

• one environment (prod1) was created with an order from October 2023,
• the other environment (prod2) was created with an order from August 2024.

The environment prod2 was created after 2 July, but there is a remaining contract to be renewed for October 2024. The whole account is subject to the fair use policy after environment prod1 is renewed with a new order in October 2024. Thus, all contracts under the account run under the fair use policy.

Are there examples of typical MVS sizes (RAM/ CPU count) or transaction rates/various component numbers from which the 325 GB fair use limit is likely to be reached?

There is no way to know ahead of time what a specific client ingest will be until they are running. The combination of application size, trace span sizes, log data volumes, transaction rates and more go into determining just how data is created and consumed. However, it is possible to view a forecast based on the current data ingestion in the account and billing page.

What happens when we go over the fair use limit?

For customers with exceptional data ingestion needs, Instana offers an add-on providing additional capacity for regular use cases and an on-demand ‘pay-per-use’ option.

Will I lose functionalities if I go over my limit?

The data ingest is not capped; clients are allowed to use more than their Fair use Entitlement value. If a client adopted more data ingest than their entitled Data ingest, this is visible as On-Demand Data Ingest.

How is the MVS usage and data ingest calculated?

The consumption logic for billing for MVS is as follows:

• Per-minute basis: MVS is tracked every minute.

• Hourly data point: Sum of MVS per minute in an hour, divided by 60.

• Daily data point: Sum of MVS for all minutes in a day, divided by 1440 (60 × 24).

• Monthly data point: Sum of daily MVS data points, divided by the number of days in the month.

This is the value and logic that is used for billing and displayed in graphs and tables in portal and in-product. This approach provides a more granular and potentially smoother average, which mitigates the impact of single day or short-duration spikes.

For data ingestion, consumption is calculated on a per-minute basis and aggregated into hourly, daily, and monthly values. Actual Data-Ingest Total = Data Ingest from (Infrastructure + Traces + Synthetics + EUM Mobile + EUM website).

FAQ