Frequently Asked Questions¶

Plan Selection and Billing Methods¶

Can Session Replay have its own retention period of 3 or 7 days, like logs?

It depends on your plan:

• Commercial Plan: No. Session Replay storage policy is tied to Real User Monitoring (RUM) and uses the RUM storage policy (3/7/14 days). It cannot be adjusted separately.
• Deployment Plan: Yes, the storage policy for Session Replay can be configured separately in the admin console.

My business is mainly in China, but some users are overseas. Should I choose CNY or USD for billing?

Guance has two billing center systems:

The currency choice affects invoice types and payment methods and must be determined when registering the workspace. If your business spans multiple regions, we recommend creating separate workspaces in different regions and settling each in the local currency.

I have been billing in CNY for some time. Can I switch to USD?

You cannot switch directly through self-service. Because this involves different billing center systems (China vs. Global) and account migration, you need to:

1. Contact your Account Manager to submit a currency switch request.
2. Historical bills of the original workspace remain billed in CNY.
3. Charges incurred after the switch are billed in USD.

Before switching, settle any outstanding balance in your CNY account and evaluate the impact of exchange rate fluctuations on your budget.

My log volume is very large but access frequency is low. Which is more cost-effective, the Commercial Plan or the Enterprise Plan?

It depends on the ratio between your write traffic and total storage:

• Commercial Plan: Billed by write volume (entry count or traffic) plus tiered pricing by retention period. It is suitable for scenarios with high data access frequency, long-term storage, and frequent queries. For short-term storage only (3-7 days), the Commercial Plan is usually more economical.

• Enterprise Plan: Billed by compressed write traffic plus total storage, regardless of retention period. It is suitable for scenarios with extremely large log volumes, low query frequency, and long-term archiving needs. Even with 360-day storage, the unit price does not increase by retention tier, but you continue to pay for total storage.

If your data has a high compression ratio (for example, text logs can be compressed to 20%) and your retention period is 30 days, we recommend contacting your Account Manager to evaluate the Enterprise Plan.

Data Storage Policy Changes¶

Why didn't my bill decrease immediately when I shortened log retention from 14 days to 3 days?

This is caused by the rolling billing mechanism. After the policy is changed for non-metric data (logs, traces, etc.):

1. Historical data: continues to be retained until the original retention period (14 days) is reached, and is billed at the higher unit price of the original policy.
2. New data: is immediately billed at the lower unit price of the new policy.

Therefore, the cost decrease has a 14-day transition period. If you need to reduce costs immediately, you must manually delete historical data (which will cause data loss).

After a metric data storage policy change, old data is deleted immediately, costs decrease immediately, but the data cannot be recovered.

If I modify the storage policy multiple times on the same day, which modification takes precedence?

The first modification of the day takes effect immediately; subsequent modifications take effect the next day.

Example scenario:

• 09:00: Change logs from 14 days to 7 days → takes effect immediately; the 7-day unit price is billed from that day onward.
• 15:00: Change logs again from 7 days to 3 days → takes effect at 00:00 the next day; today is still billed at 7 days.

We recommend not making multiple adjustments in one day to avoid confusing billing records.

Why are metric and non-metric data handled differently after a storage policy change?

• Metric data: takes effect immediately after the change; old data is deleted immediately and cannot be recovered. This is because metric data is large in volume and frequently updated, so the system uses an immediate cleanup policy.

• Non-metric data (logs, traces, Profiles, RUM, etc.): after the change, new data is billed under the new policy, while old data is retained until the end of the original retention period. This is because non-metric data usually has audit value and data continuity must be ensured.

Shortening metric retention reduces costs immediately, but the full cost reduction from shortening non-metric retention is only visible after the transition period.

After enabling "Custom Multi-Index", why can the storage policy only be changed for the "default" index? What about the other indexes?

Each index is independently bound to a storage policy. Steps to change:

1. Go to Logs > Index Management.
2. Set the retention period separately for each custom index.
3. Each index is billed according to its own retention policy.

If a custom index does not have a policy set separately, it inherits the policy of the default index by default. However, each index is counted independently for billing; they are not combined.

Billing Items and Calculation Logic¶

For Commercial Plan logs, when is it more advantageous to switch between billing by entry count and billing by write traffic?

The key is the average size of a single log entry:

• Single entry < 1 KB: per-entry billing is usually better (1 GB is about 1 million entries; per-entry billing may only require 1 unit).
• Single entry > 10 KB (ES) or > 2 KB (SLS): traffic-based billing is better, avoiding large logs being split into multiple entries for billing.

If a monitor detection interval is set to 30 minutes, are Triggers calculated as 2 (30/15) or 6 (base 5 + 1 excess)?

The latter is correct. The billing formula is:

Total = base count for detection type + ⌈(detection interval - 15 minutes) / 15 minutes⌉

For sudden change detection (base count 5) with a 30-minute interval:

• Base: 5
• Excess: (30-15)/15 = 1, rounded up to 1
• Total: 6

What usage is generated when an AI monitor executes one detection?

Each time an AI monitor executes a detection, the following two types of usage are generated and counted separately:

• Triggers: counted as 1 Trigger;
• AI Credits: deducted based on the Credits actually consumed by this detection.

The "per-detection credit budget" in advanced settings controls credit consumption for a single detection. It does not mean that this fixed amount is deducted every time.

How are Triggers calculated for different Smart Monitoring types?

Different types are counted according to the following rules:

• Host/Log/Application Intelligent Detection: 10 per execution
• RUM Intelligent Detection: 100 per execution
• AI Smart Monitoring: 100 per execution

Each time AI Smart Monitoring executes a detection, Credits are also deducted based on the actual consumption of this AI analysis. Triggers and Credits are counted separately.

Trace data is sometimes billed by Trace and sometimes by Span. How can I predict my bill?

The system automatically chooses the more favorable option:

• If the number of Traces is greater than or equal to the number of Spans / 10, billing is by Trace (per million Traces).
• Otherwise, billing is by Span (per 10 million Spans).

You can view the service overview in Application Performance Monitoring (APM). If the average number of Spans per Trace is greater than 10, billing is likely by Span; if less than 10, billing is by Trace. You can adjust the sampling strategy to control the number of Traces, thereby affecting the billing method.

An escalation policy notification deducts 100 Triggers each time it is triggered. Is the deduction applied every time a notification is sent?

Yes. Each time an escalation policy is matched, 100 Triggers are recorded when a notification is sent.

In the Commercial Plan, why do events and self-created synthetic test data use the storage policy of the default log index by default?

Because these two types of data are physically stored in the default index of logs:

• Event data (generated by monitors, SLOs, and Intelligent Inspection) is stored in the default index.
• Self-created synthetic test data is reported through DataKit and is also stored in the default index.

Therefore, their retention period and billing unit price inherit the configuration of the default index. If you need separate adjustments, there is currently no way to set an independent storage policy directly for events or self-created synthetic tests. You can only indirectly affect them by adjusting the retention period of the default index.

Exception: Although synthetic test data from Guance nodes is also stored in the default index, test execution itself is billed separately by the number of tests, which is a different dimension from storage billing.

Data Splitting and Compression Billing¶

Oversized logs have different splitting thresholds in ES and SLS storage. How do I calculate my actual number of entries?

Calculate separately according to your storage type:

ES storage:

• Single entry ≤ 10 KB: billed as 1 entry.
• Single entry > 10 KB: billed entries = ⌈actual size / 10 KB⌉

Example: a 15 KB log counts as 2 entries; a 25 KB log counts as 3 entries.

SLS storage:

• Single entry ≤ 2 KB: billed as 1 entry.
• Single entry > 2 KB: billed entries = ⌈actual size / 2 KB⌉

Example: a 3 KB log counts as 2 entries; a 5 KB log counts as 3 entries.

A Session Replay session lasts 5 hours and is split into 2 billing units. Are these two units billed continuously or allocated based on actual active time?

Billing is based on integer multiples rounded up, regardless of time distribution:

Billing units = ⌈time_spent / 4 hours⌉ = ⌈5/4⌉ = 2 units

These 2 units are included in the day's bill in one lump sum, not billed by the hour in segments. Even if there is 1 hour of inactivity in the middle of the Session, as long as the time_spent field shows a total duration of 5 hours, it is billed as 2 units.

When a Profile file exceeding 300KB is split, is it stored as separate entries after splitting, or is only billing split?

Only billing is split; storage remains as the original file. The system splits large Profile files into multiple records for indexing and billing (1 entry per 300KB), but at the storage layer they are still associated as one Profile collection. This prevents oversized single records from affecting query performance while ensuring that billing is proportional to storage resource consumption.

What does "take the larger of PV and PV/100" mean in RUM PV billing?

This is a minimum billing mechanism for low-traffic scenarios:

• If the daily PV is 500, then 500/100=5; the larger value is 500, so billing is 500.
• If the daily PV is 50, then 50/100=0.5; the larger value is 50, so billing is still 50 (not 0.5 or 1).

Only when the PV count is greater than 100 does PV/100 become greater than 1, in which case the PV count itself is used. This rule mainly avoids calculation precision issues with extremely small traffic and has no practical impact on normal business traffic (>100 PV/day).

In Sensitive Data Scanning, why are multiple charges incurred when multiple fields in the same log entry are masked?

Because billing is based on field-level scanned traffic:

• Each field that needs masking has its raw traffic calculated separately.
• Even if these fields belong to the same log entry, they are billed separately.

Example: a 1 KB log entry contains 3 sensitive fields. Scanning is billed based on the total raw traffic of the 3 fields (which may be greater than 1 KB, depending on the field content size), rather than the 1 KB of the single log entry.

Plan Switching and Data Flow¶

After upgrading from the Free Plan to the Commercial Plan, why can't I see data from the Free Plan period?

Free Plan data is stored in a separate instance. After the upgrade:

• DataKit configuration: it automatically points to the Commercial Plan workspace, and data continues to be reported.
• Historical data: it remains in the Free Plan environment and is usually automatically cleaned up after 7 days. It cannot be viewed in the Commercial Plan.

Historical data from the Free Plan cannot be migrated to the Commercial Plan. To keep it, back it up using the data export feature before upgrading.