LogDNA announced early access for Variable Retention.

This new capability allows companies to better control spend by storing different types or sources of logs for different lengths of time.

Modern infrastructure and applications generate massive amounts of data—sometimes petabytes worth of log data in a single day. Many teams need access to this data to gain critical insights into their services, but logging can get expensive, fast, and companies are forced to make difficult trade-offs that reduce observability and heighten risk. As a result, teams may not have the granular log data needed to form a complete picture during an incident or troubleshooting workflow. Variable Retention gives users the flexibility to save logs within the platform only for the amount of time that they're relevant, ensuring teams get access to the data they need, when they need it, while keeping costs in check.

“Different organizational and business functions need varying amounts and periods of data, but cost concerns drive sacrifices on what to keep and force dollar-driven decisions that diminish the value of all that data,” said Tucker Callaway, CEO, LogDNA. “Variable Retention gives LogDNA users control, removing friction that impacts how autonomous teams use log and other machine data to be more efficient and secure. Now, teams don’t have to choose between a reasonable logging bill and comprehensive observability data.”

Within the LogDNA user interface, customers select a subset of logs to store for different retention periods based on their needs—for instance, 30 days for security logs but only seven days for quality assurance and testing logs. When these rules are in place, users can monitor how their logging volume is distributed across different tiers in their usage dashboard to ensure the appropriate logs are being put in their respective retention tiers.

This new capability is one of many built by LogDNA to give users more control over how teams can route and store their log data. Earlier this year, the company released Spike Protection to give organizations more control over fluctuations of log data. And the recently announced LogDNA Streaming enables enterprises to ingest all of their log data to a single platform, and then route it for any enterprise use case.

Available retention tiers are three days, seven days, 14 days, and 30 days. LogDNA customers on an enterprise plan can sign up for the private beta program.