Calculate your consumption of Traces - Retain (DPS)
- Latest Dynatrace
- Concept
- 6-min read
- Published Aug 12, 2025
This page describes how the Traces - Retain DPS capability is consumed and billed. For an overview of the capability, including its main features, see Traces - Retain.
How consumption is calculated: GiB-day
Retain is the amount of data saved to storage after data parsing, enrichment, transforming, and filtering. Data is measured in the last OpenPipeline step before data is stored in buckets. Billed volumes are calculated before compression. The measured size is independent of the data source or protocol. It is calculated per gibibyte saved in storage, per day (GiB-day).
- The default trace data retention period of 10 days is included.
- Extended trace data retention for up to 10 years is charged as Traces – Retain if the customer explicitly configures extended retention.
Track your consumption
Apply the following calculation to determine your daily consumption for the Retain data-usage dimension:
(GiB of uncompressed span data stored for more than 10 days) * (GiB-day rate price as per your Rate Card) = consumption
Track your consumption
On the environment level, Dynatrace provides pre-made Notebooks for each DPS capability that you can use for detailed analysis. These are available in Account Management (Subscription > Overview > Cost and usage details > Select the capability > Actions > Open details with Notebooks > Select or create Notebook).
The following chart shows an example of the amount of data stored in one bucket. The volume increases over time until the configured retention time is reached. Once the retention time is reached, the retained data volume remains approximately stable.
