The amount of storage for APM data depends on several factors: the number of services you are instrumenting, how much traffic the services see, agent and server settings, and the length of time you store your data.

Here are some ways you can reduce either the amount of APM data you’re ingesting or the amount of data you’re retaining.

Reduce the sample rateedit

Distributed tracing can generate a substantial amount of data. More data can mean higher costs and more noise. Sampling aims to lower the amount of data ingested and the effort required to analyze that data.

See Transaction sampling to learn more.

Enable span compressionedit

In some cases, APM agents may collect large amounts of very similar or identical spans in a transaction. These repeated, similar spans often don’t provide added benefit, especially if they are of very short duration. Span compression takes these similar spans and compresses them into a single span-- retaining important information but reducing processing and storage overhead.

See Span compression to learn more.

Reduce collected stack trace informationedit

Elastic APM agents collect stacktrace information under certain circumstances. This can be very helpful in identifying issues in your code, but it also comes with an overhead at collection time and increases the storage usage.

Stack trace collection settings are managed in each agent.

Delete dataedit

You might want to only keep data for a defined time period. This might mean deleting old documents periodically, deleting data collected for specific services or customers, or deleting specific indices.

Depending on your use case, you can delete data:

If you want to delete data for security or privacy reasons, see Data security.

Delete data with index lifecycle management (ILM)edit

Index lifecycle management enables you to automate how you want to manage your indices over time. You can base actions on factors such as shard size and performance requirements. See Index lifecycle management to learn more.

Delete data matching a queryedit

You can delete all APM documents matching a specific query with the Delete By Query API. For example, to delete all documents with a given service.name, use the following request:

POST /.ds-*-apm*/_delete_by_query
{
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "service.name": {
        "value": "old-service-name"
      }
    }
  }
}

Delete data with Kibana Index Managementedit

Kibana’s Index Management allows you to manage your cluster’s indices, data streams, index templates, and much more.

In Kibana, navigate to Stack Management > Index Management > Data Streams. Select the data streams you want to delete, and click Delete data streams.

Update existing dataedit

You might want to update documents that are already indexed. For example, if you your service name was set incorrectly.

To do this, you can use the Update By Query API. To rename a service, send the following request:

POST /.ds-*-apm*/_update_by_query?expand_wildcards=all
{
  "query": {
    "term": {
      "service.name": {
        "value": "current-service-name"
      }
    }
  },
  "script": {
    "source": "ctx._source.service.name = 'new-service-name'",
    "lang": "painless"
  }
}