How should telemetry retention be decided for an Instana deployment?
Select an answer to reveal the explanation.
Short Explanation
You decide telemetry retention by balancing how far back teams genuinely need to investigate, what regulations require the organisation to keep, and what the available storage can hold. It’s where operational need, compliance, and capacity meet.
Full Explanation
The correct approach is balancing how far back teams genuinely need to investigate, what regulations require the organisation to keep, and what the available storage can hold. Retention is a negotiated outcome. Operational need sets a floor for how far back investigations reach, regulation may set a separate and longer floor for certain data, and storage capacity sets the ceiling. The defensible policy is where those meet.
Keeping all telemetry indefinitely is wrong because unbounded retention has a real and growing cost, and most operational telemetry loses value quickly. Deleting telemetry as soon as its alerts have fired is wrong because post-incident investigation almost always needs the data from before and around an alert, which is exactly what this would discard. Applying a uniform period chosen to match the application's branding refresh cycle is wrong because retention is driven by operational and regulatory requirements, not by unrelated business cycles.
Exam caveat: name all three drivers rather than only the storage one.