The Meter Explorer provides advanced capabilities to analyze and understand your observability costs through detailed meter metrics. With the powerful SigNoz query interface, you can drill deeper into each meter metric to extract meaningful insights about your ingested telemetry data and optimize your observability spend.
What you'll learn:
- Understanding the structure and components of meter data
- How to break down signal meter data by specific label dimensions
- How Cost Meter data is retained for longer-term analysis
- How to save and reuse queries with Saved Views
Overview
Meter Explorer enables you to monitor and control your observability costs by providing granular visibility into your telemetry data ingestion patterns. By leveraging the familiar SigNoz query interface, you can analyze meter metrics to understand consumption trends, identify cost drivers, and make informed decisions about your observability strategy.
Quick Filters
The Meter Explorer includes a quick filters panel on the left side to narrow down your data. The default filters are:
- Deployment Environment
- Service Name
- Host Name
You can add more filters by clicking the settings icon at the top of the filters panel and selecting Edit quick filters. For example, you can add signoz.workspace.key.id, connector_id, or metric_name as additional quick filters.
Only users with the Admin role can edit quick filters.
Prerequisites
Before using Meter Explorer, ensure you have:
- Familiarity with how metrics work in SigNoz
- A running SigNoz instance with telemetry data being ingested
- Understanding of the SigNoz query interface (helpful but not required)
Understanding Meter Metrics
Meter metrics provide detailed information about your telemetry data ingestion, helping you understand consumption patterns and costs. Let's explore the structure and components of meter data.
Namespace
All meter data exposed by SigNoz follows a consistent namespace pattern and is queryable through the standard metrics interface. Each meter metric is namespaced with signoz.meter and follows standard metric aggregation patterns.
Available Metrics
SigNoz exposes five core meter metrics that provide comprehensive visibility into your telemetry data ingestion:
| Metric Name | Description | Type | Temporality |
|---|---|---|---|
signoz.meter.log.count | Total number of log records ingested | Sum | Delta |
signoz.meter.log.size | Total size of log records ingested (in bytes) | Sum | Delta |
signoz.meter.span.count | Total number of spans ingested | Sum | Delta |
signoz.meter.span.size | Total size of spans ingested (in bytes) | Sum | Delta |
signoz.meter.metric.datapoint.count | Total number of metric datapoints ingested | Sum | Delta |
Metric Labels
Each meter metric includes a fixed set of labels that enable you to slice and dice your data across different dimensions:
connector_id: The connector identifier for the telemetry datadeployment.environment: The deployment environment (e.g., production, staging, development)host.name: The hostname of the system generating the dataservice.name: The name of the service generating the telemetry datasignoz.workspace.key.id: The ID of the ingestion key used for ingesting telemetry data
These labels allow you to analyze your metering data across multiple dimensions, helping you identify which services, environments, or hosts are contributing most to your observability costs.
Data Retention
Meter data is retained for a period of 1 year. This retention policy ensures that you have access to historical data for long-term analysis and trend identification. By maintaining a year-long history, you can make more informed decisions about your observability strategy and cost optimization efforts over time.
Saved Views
Meter Explorer supports saved views, allowing you to create and reuse common queries for recurring cost analysis. Once you have built a query with the right metric, filters, and groupings, click Save this view at the bottom of the Explorer page to save it for later reuse.
You can select a previously saved view from the Select a view dropdown to quickly load it without rebuilding the query each time.
For more details on creating and managing saved views, see the Saved View documentation.
Next steps
- Try common queries in the Meter Examples guide.
- Set up Meter Alerts to get notified when ingestion volumes or costs exceed your thresholds.
- View the Cost Meter Dashboard for a high-level overview of your ingestion costs.
