Create billing dashboards

You can create a dashboard to visualize and monitor your Lightstep Observability usage. Usage metrics are available for the following usage types:

• active time series
• span data

Create a Lightstep Observability billing dashboard

You’ll use the lightstep.billing.hourly_active_time_series metric to monitor your active time series and the lightstep.billing.span_bytes metric to monitor your span data.

These metrics report at the project level. You need to create this dashboard for each project you want to monitor

1. From the navigation bar, click Dashboards.

   

2. Click Create a dashboard.

3. Click in the title to rename your dashboard to Lightstep Billing.

   

4. To add a chart to monitor active time series, click Add a chart.

5. Name the chart Active Time Series and enter lightstep.billing.hourly_active_time_series as the metric name.

   This metric is a gauge and measures the number of unique time series written to Lightstep Observability within an hour.

   You need to enter the full metric name. Lightstep Observability will not auto-complete this metric.

   

   The active time series metric is delayed by 12-24 hours. To see data in the chart, set the time picker to Last 1 week.

6. Click Save.

7. Repeat steps 5-7 to create a chart for span data usage, using the lightstep.billing.span_bytes metric.

   This metric is a delta and measures the number of span bytes ingested by Lightstep Observability.

   You can group by satellite_pool.

   

8. Click Save and close the chart.

   The dashboard now displays both charts.

You can now create alerts to warn you when you are starting to reach your billing threshold.