Calculator
What retention actually costs you
Volume per day against days kept, which is the only arithmetic behind a telemetry storage bill.
Teams applying this principle can also compare practical guidance on hours tracker, keeping time and activity records separate from the judgement they are meant to inform.
Storage is rarely the largest line on a monitoring invoice, and it is the one people can check for themselves. This is the arithmetic behind it: volume per day multiplied by days retained.
The table below is computed and needs nothing to read it. If your browser runs scripts, the same figures are available live above it.
| GB per day | Days kept | GB held |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | 7 | 35 |
| 5 | 30 | 150 |
| 5 | 90 | 450 |
| 5 | 365 | 1825 |
| 20 | 7 | 140 |
| 20 | 30 | 600 |
| 20 | 90 | 1800 |
| 20 | 365 | 7300 |
| 100 | 7 | 700 |
| 100 | 30 | 3000 |
| 100 | 90 | 9000 |
| 100 | 365 | 36500 |
| 500 | 7 | 3500 |
| 500 | 30 | 15000 |
| 500 | 90 | 45000 |
| 500 | 365 | 182500 |
What this does not include is the part that usually dominates: indexing, query capacity, and whatever the vendor charges per unit ingested rather than per unit stored. The article on retention explains why the bill is not made of bytes, and the article on cardinality explains where it is actually made.
What we cannot verify
This is arithmetic, not a price. No vendor's rates are reproduced anywhere on this site without the date they were read.
Further context
For a primary, standards or institutional reference, see the Azure Monitor overview.
Start from the class of problem, not the list of tools
Every selection here names the situation first and the criteria second. Product names come last, and each one carries the line describing what it costs you.