If your account is nearing its daily quota, Logz.io sends an email alert to account administrators. That’s fine for most situations, but what if you want to be more proactive in managing your accounts?
For this, you have account utilization metrics (which saves log size and other metadata) and drop filters (which allow you to stop ingestion of some logs).
- Enabling account utilization metrics and log size
- Log utilization
- Tracing utilization
- Saving log size
- Visualizing utilization with an ELK app
- Managing ingestion with drop filters
What are account utilization metrics?
Account utilization metrics capture a snapshot of your account usage in regular increments Logz.io starts logging your usage after your account reaches 10 MB in size.
Enabling account utilization metrics and log size
Account utilization metrics and log size are set per individual account. You can find these settings on the Manage accounts page below Advanced options. This page is available only from your main account—you won’t be able to make this change from a sub account.
Even though you need to be an account admin to enable this setting, everyone who has access to your Logz.io account can see the resulting logs.
Log utilization
Once you enable log utilization, you can choose the increment that suits your needs - every 10, 30, or 60 minutes.
You can find these logs in OpenSearch Dashboards when you filter for the logzio_account_utilization log type. They include the following fields:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
| account_id | Logz.io account ID |
| account_name | Name of this account |
| expected_utilization_EOD | Expected utilization by the end of the day, in percent |
| expected_volume_in_GB_EOD | The expected utilization by the end of the day, in GB |
| grace_capacity | The overage configured on the account, in percent. For instance, 120% means that you have an overage allowance of 20% of your plan volume. |
| number_of_fields | The total number of fields in the current index |
| plan_retention_in_days | The number of days data is kept in the account until it is deleted |
| plan_volume_in_GB | Data allocated to this account, in GB |
| utilization | Current utilization, in percent |
| volume_in_GB | Current utilization, in GB |
Account utilization metrics for flexible accounts
The following fields are used for flexible volume accounts.
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
| is_flexible | Indicates whether the account is fixed or flexible (Boolean) |
| cap_volume | Optional maximum data volume for the account, in GB. This value can be 0: That is, the account has unlimited access to shared volume. |
| expected_volume_in_GB_EOD | An estimate of how much data the account will be used by the end of the day, in GB. The estimation is based on how much data was sent until the current hour. |
| reserved_volume | Volume guaranteed for the account per calendar day, in GB. This value can be 0: That is, no reserved volume is configured for the account. |
| used_from_shareable | The amount of data used from the shareable volume, in GB |
For flexible accounts, the amount of data you used from the shareable volume is derived from the difference between your current utilization and your reserved account volume: used_from_shareable = volume_in_GB - reserved_volume
Obviously, the value can’t be negative: If you haven’t used any of the shared volume, used_from_shareable will be normalized to 0.
In your logs, you might see something like this: 
Tracing utilization
Every Tracing account has the utilization option enabled by default, working in increments of 10 minutes. This lets you view and analyze your tracing data usage in real-time.
These logs are saved as part of your Tracing account and are visible from OpenSearch Dashboards.
Navigate to OpenSearch Dashboards and select your Tracing account. Next, filter for the logzio_tracing_account_utilization log type.
Trace utilization logs include the following fields:
| Field name | Description |
|---|---|
| account_monthly_spans_limit | The maximum amount of spans you can send to this account each calendar month. |
| account_plan_allocation_percent | The percentage of the account from the overall budget. |
| current_daily_usage_count | The number of spans sent to your account today. |
| current_daily_usage_percent | A percentage that presents the number of spans sent to your account based on the account’s daily limit and multiplier. You can change the multiplier per Tracing account on the Manage accounts page. |
| current_monthly_usage_count | The number of spans sent to your account this month. |
| current_monthly_usage_percent | A percentage view of your monthly span usage. |
| daily_index_size_limit_suspension_factor | The number represents a multiplier of your estimated daily span account. You can configure a number ranging from x2 to x30 to limit the daily spans sent to the Tracing account. The default value is 8. |
| estimated_daily_usage_percent | A percentage estimation of how many spans will be used today. |
| estimated_monthly_usage_percent | A percentage estimation of how many spans will be used this month. |
| overall_budget_monthly_spans_number | The total amount of spans you can send to this account each calendar month. |
| tracing_account_id | Your Logz.io Tracing account ID |
| type | The log type, logzio_tracing_account_utilization. |
Saving log size
When you enable saving log size,
a new field is added to incoming logs.
This new field is called LogSize,
and it contains the size of the log line in bytes, taken as a single string.
OpenSearch Dashboards doesn’t recognize LogSize as a number right away.
You can fix this by clicking (refresh mapping) for LogSize in OpenSearch Dashboards.
You’ll need to do this for each account where you enabled LogSize.
Visualizing utilization with an ELK app
We offer a preconfigured dashboard for account utilization metrics. You can find this dashboard in the ELK Apps by searching for “data volume dashboard”.
If you recently enabled account utilization metrics, you may need to wait up to 60 minutes before this data shows up in OpenSearch Dashboards.
Managing ingestion with drop filters
We recommend shipping only the logs you need so that you don’t end up paying for unnecessary data retention.
However, if you’re sending logs that you’ll need only sometimes (such as debug logs), you can set up a drop filter.
Logs caught by drop filters aren’t ingested, so they won’t count against your plan limits. However, the volume of logs you can filter is based on your plan’s quota. For more information, see Some important notes on drop filtering.
Dropped logs will never arrive at your Logz.io account, so they can’t be searched or trigger alerts. Always confirm you’re dropping the right logs when you apply a new filter.