Data retention policies let you control how long different types of data are stored in your project before being automatically deleted.
Each project can optionally inherit its retention policies from the organization. When enabled, the project uses the organization-level retention settings and individual controls are disabled. Toggle Inherit from organization off to configure project-specific retention periods.
You can set a separate retention period for each of the following data types:
For each data type, choose one of:
You select one unit per data type — these are not combined. For example, you set traces & spans to “2 Years”, not “2 Years and 30 Days”.
To configure retention:
Retention cleanup happens daily at midnight UTC. Changing retention settings will not trigger an immediate deletion — stale data will be removed during the next cleanup cycle.
When data is deleted, any child data associated with it gets deleted too. Here’s how the hierarchy works:
For example, if you set your trace & span retention to 14 days, any traces older than 14 days will be deleted along with all their associated spans and metrics.