The Cost Meter dashboard is the main view for understanding how your observability usage is distributed across logs, traces, and metrics. Use it to compare total ingestion, identify expensive signals, and decide where to drill deeper with Meter Explorer or alerts.
Meter data is aggregated over hourly intervals. Queries with time ranges under 1 hour will not return any data.
Total Overview
The Total overview provides a combined view of all cost contributors — log record size, span size, and metric datapoints — in a single chart. Use it to understand the overall ingestion trend for the selected time range.
Logs
The Logs section provides detailed insights into your log telemetry costs and consumption patterns. It shows log record count and total log data size ingested over the selected time range.
Traces
The Traces section shows span ingestion patterns including span count and total span data size. Use it to identify high-volume services driving trace costs.
Metrics
The Metrics section displays metric datapoint count, which directly maps to cardinality and billing. Monitor this to understand your metrics cost footprint.
How to use the dashboard
- Start with Total overview to understand the overall ingestion trend for the selected time range.
- Use the signal-specific sections to see whether logs, traces, or metrics are driving the largest share of ingestion.
- Move into Meter Explorer when you need more detailed breakdowns by service, environment, host, or ingestion key.
- Set up Meter Alerts when you want to monitor a threshold instead of checking the dashboard manually.
