is there a way to set retention policy for data that signoz stores in s3 as well?

The way I understand it is the total retention is how long the data will be stored on s3. The move to s3 is when clickhouse will utilize the s3 storage for queries and not the local disk. So total retention is for s3, move to s3 is retention for local disk

can u share any references to confirm this?

I can try to find it. I had to dig into the code to see what these functions did in clickhouse. I didn’t find documentation that explained it well. And that came after we experienced a 4x increase on our AWS bill because the move to s3 was really low and so we were pulling a lot of data too often from s3.

understood. so what values worked well for you to keep the bill low? I am thinking 2-3 weeks worth of data on local, and rest on the s3. Actually, Ideal scenario would have been tiered storage which is available in clickhouse. • use local till space is avilable and then keep moving older data to s3 • total retention is across the board for all data wherever it is stored

It depends on your users behaviors. For us logs are used heavily especially over longer period of times so I made that move to s3 longer so that most searches fell into the local disk. For the others like metrics and traces we only look over the last few days.