How DPM monitoring helps you manage your metrics volume

At Sumo Logic, we’re committed to helping you scale without breaking your budget. As you may have heard, we recently launched Flex Licensing, a first-of-its-kind economic model that offers free, unlimited log data ingest so different teams can capture and analyze critical data across their enterprise in one place.

We’re also committed to tackling related challenges raised by other data sources — like metrics. As part of our pricing, we use a mechanism called DPMs (or data points per minute) to measure your metrics ingest. To provide you with extra cost confidence, we’re excited to announce new functionality that lets you easily monitor your DPM volume within our platform.

The DPM difference

We know what you may be thinking: “What’s a DPM again?” DPMs are not an industry-standard term — but that’s a good thing. For too long, many monitoring tools have priced metrics leveraging a host-based model, which is no longer a modern way of charging metrics customers.

Instead of focusing on hosts, a DPM is the average number of metric data points ingested per minute in one thousand increments, or put another way, a simple average of the data points you send to Sumo Logic each minute for a day.

For example, if you send 10,000 metrics to Sumo Logic every 60 seconds, you will generate 10,000 DPMs for that day. If those 10,000 metrics are sent every 30 seconds, or twice a minute, the DPMs will double to 20,000 DPMs.

This model is simple compared to a host-based model, especially when modern architectures increasingly make it difficult to count one’s hosts when you’re running ephemeral services and serverless functions. Cloud adoption has also potentially expanded the number of hosts in play — one server may become dozens of VMs — and in turn, host-based pricing could significantly increase your costs.

In short, DPMs give you a more straightforward way to control and understand your metrics costs.

Let’s get monitoring

While you may have used our data volume application to keep track of your metrics ingest, our new DPM volume monitoring functionality helps you understand your DPM volume, peaks, average and credit burn rate, in addition to which data sources are driving your DPMs.

This means better visibility and control over your data volume.

You can find the DPM monitoring functionality from the metrics tab within “Manage Data.”

For custom analysis, you can also query the sumologic_volume index.

These capabilities can help you take action to determine which metrics contribute most to your overall credit consumption.

The cost-effective option for your logs and metrics

At Sumo Logic, we remain relentlessly focused on making data and analytics more economical for our customers. New functionality like DPM volume monitoring arms you with another lever to have greater confidence, alongside our innovative Flex licensing model for logs.

Check out our documentation to learn more about DPM monitoring or start a trial to get started monitoring your apps and infrastructure with Sumo Logic today.