Monitor usage

Lightstep offers several features for monitoring your billing and usage. You can use the features to:

• Visualize and track your overall Lightstep usage and overages.
• See details about your span and Active Time Series (ATS) ingestion.
• Identify metrics and streams used in alerts, dashboards, and notebooks.

This page describes the Billing and usage pages in Lightstep: Overview, Span data ingest, and Active time series. It also lists other ways to monitor Lightstep usage.

Billing and usage: Overview

You access the Overview page from the Account management menu.

The user’s role determines what is displayed on this page.

Your usage for each part of the bundle is calculated across all projects in your organization for the duration of a billing period.

Usage is updated every 24 hours at 02:00 UTC.

Hover over a usage bar to see the breakdown per project (not available for active services).

You can view contract details to see the number of products allotted to your organization by clicking What are my contract details?

Use the Billing period drop-down to review previous usage.

Overages

If your usage goes over your allotment, the bar for that item displays in red, along with the percentage you are over.

Additionally, Lightstep sends an email to Billing admins when an account is close to any of their limits and again when the account starts incurring overage charges.

Only Lightstep Customer Success representatives can assign the Billing admin role. Contact your Customer Success representative to assign or reassign the Billing admin role. Note that the Billing admin role doesn’t exist in free Lightstep plans.

Billing and usage: Span data ingest

You can see details for the amount of span data that Lightstep has ingested over the last 24 hours by clicking Span data ingest in the Account management menu.

The Span data ingest page has a bar graph that shows the amount of data (GB) ingested for each service emitting span data to Lightstep, ordered from largest to smallest, along with a line chart showing that ingest over the billing period. A table at the bottom of the page provides detailed usage for each service.

When you hover over a time series in the line chart, the Value column in the table shows the value for that point in time. When not hovering over the chart, the value represents the latest value for that service.

Billing and usage: Active time series

To view details about your ATS ingestion and usage in Lightstep, click Account management > Active time series.

The page displays two tabs (Overview and All metrics) and several visualizations about your data. The sections below describe the tabs in more detail.

Overview

The Overview tab visualizes ATS ingestion and usage. Use this tab to learn about the projects, services, and metrics with the most ATS.

The tab reports data at the project level for the last 30 days. To view the data for a different project, click the drop-down next to View the last 30 days for project.

The following table lists and describes the Overview visualizations. It also lists what you can do to learn more about your data.

Visualization	What it is	Things to do
Usage for this project	Shows the project’s ATS usage as a percentage of your organization’s ATS usage. In the image above, the demo project makes up 17.23% of the organization’s total ATS usage in the last 30 days.	None.
Most ingested ATS by	Shows the metrics with the most ATS in the last 30 days. The visualization displays up to the top 1000 results. In the image above, the responses metric has the greatest ATS number at 789 ATS.	To learn about a metric, click the metric to view its details in a panel. To visualize the number of ATS ingested by service, click the Most ingested ATS by drop-down. To export the data to a comma-separated file, click Export to csv.
Single-number chart	Shows the percentage of ATS not used in a Lightstep alert, dashboard, or notebook. In the image above, 0% means, in the last 30 days, every ATS in the demo project appears in a Lightstep alert, dashboard, or notebook.	Click View ATS by metric to visit the All metrics tab and learn how you’re using metrics in Lightstep. You can use that information to create metric ingestion rules and control Lightstep costs.
Average hourly active time series ingested by	Shows the metrics with the highest ATS ingestion rates. The visualization displays up to the top 1000 results.	To visualize the rate of ATS ingested by service, click the Average hourly active time series ingested by drop-down. To view specific values in the table below, hover over the visualization’s time series. To export the data to a comma-separated file, click Export to csv.

Lightstep uses the service.name attribute or the attribute you registered to determine the services that emit metrics.

All metrics

The All metrics tab shows if and where you’re using metrics and ATS in Lightstep. Use this tab to find and block low-value data, helping you reduce your Lightstep costs.

The tab reports data at the project level for the last 30 days. To view the data for a different project, click the drop-down next to View the last 30 days for project.

Click the tabs below to learn about the different All metrics sections.

• Single-number charts
• Metrics tabs and tables
• Things to do

• The single-number charts show the percentage of ATS from the last 30 days used and not used in Lightstep features:

  • Used - The ATS is in a Lightstep alert, dashboard, or notebook.
  • Unused - The ATS isn’t in any of those features.

  The used and not used values omit cases where ATS appear in other tools via the API. This table shows examples of when ATS are used and not used:

  ATS case	Used	Not used
  The ATS is in a Lightstep alert and notebook.	✅
  The ATS is in a Lightstep dashboard.	✅
  The ATS isn’t in a Lightstep alert, dashboard, or notebook.		✅
  The ATS isn’t in a Lightstep alert, dashboard, or notebook. The ATS is in a Grafana dashboard.		✅

• The tabs (All, Used in Lightstep, Not used in Lightstep, and Blocked) show the following information in a table. You can sort the table by column and search the table.

  Metric name
  The name of the metric. Lightstep displays a maximum of 1000 metrics in the table.

  Last 30 days ATS
  The number of ATS associated with the metric, ingested in the last 30 days.

  Overall usage
  The number of Lightstep alerts, dashboards, and notebooks the metric appears in.

  Alerts
  The number of Lightstep alerts the metric appears in.

  Dashboards
  The number of Lightstep dashboards the metric appears in.

  Notebooks
  The number of Lightstep notebooks the metric appears in.

• View metric details

  To learn more about a metric, click ⋮ > View details. The panel displays the following:

  • Attributes - Lists the metric’s attribute key-value pairs. Cardinality reports the number of values associated with the attribute key. You can hover over the Label values column to see every attribute value.
  • Usage - Lists and links to the alerts, dashboards, and notebooks using the metric.
  • Details - Shows other metric information, including who last edited the metric and when.

  Block metrics from Lightstep

  To block a metric from Lightstep, click ⋮ > Block metric ingestion. That option opens the ingestion rule configuration page. Lightstep only activates the rule if you enter a rule name and click Save.

Other ways to track usage

Along with the Billing and usage pages, you can proactively monitor and investigate usage on a per-project basis.

Active time series and span data

You can create a dashboard, as well as alerts, to monitor both your active time series and the amount of span data being ingested. When you notice an increase, you can transfer a chart to a notebook for investigation.

Active services

You can view your active services from the Reporting Status page.

Streams (retained span queries)

The Streams view lists your existing streams and where they’re used in Lightstep.