Data Tiers

This page describes Sumo Logic's Data Tiers feature.

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For related information, see Data Tiers FAQ.

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Data tier is only applicable for logs and not for metrics and trace data.

Modern enterprises collect and analyze vast amounts of data for a variety of use cases. Sumo Logic customers use ingested data to monitor operations, troubleshoot problems, to understand and better serve customers, to ensure security, and more. 

Some use cases require “high touch” data that you need to monitor and analyze continuously or frequently. For example, you need to constantly monitor production applications, troubleshoot issues, and understand your security posture. These use cases require continuous access to data like production web server and application logs; error and warning logs; and compliance and security assurance data.

Other use cases require much less frequent data analysis. Here, we’re talking about “low touch” data that can be very valuable when you want to mine your data for insights, provide periodic reports, or perform a root cause analysis. These use cases can require frequent or infrequent access to data like development, test, and pre-production logs; debug logs; CDN logs; and network logs.

Sumo Logic’s Data Tiers provide a comprehensive solution for all types of data that an organization has, low touch, high touch and everything in between, at an economical price. Data Tiers provide tier-based pricing based on your planned usage of the data you ingest. 

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Data Tiers must be enabled on your Cloud Flex Legacy account or Sumo Logic Credits account plan to be able to access this functionality. Infrequent Tier, described below, is only available on Sumo Logic Credits. For more information, contact your Sumo Logic account representative.

Types of Data Tiers 

Each Sumo Logic Data Tier supports a different use case and provides its own set of features and capabilities: 

• The Continuous Tier is for the data you use to monitor and troubleshoot production applications and to ensure the security of your applications.
• The Frequent Tier - available only for Sumo Logic Enterprise Suite plans - is for data you need to frequently access to troubleshoot and investigate issues. For example, you might use the Frequent Tier for development and test data that helps you investigate issues during development. Searching the Frequent Tier is free: it's included in the data ingestion price.
• The Infrequent Tier - available only for Sumo Logic Enterprise Suite plans - is for data that is used to troubleshoot intermittent or hard-to-reproduce issues. For example, you might use the Infrequent Tier for debug logs, OS logs, thread dumps, and so on. The Infrequent Tier has a pay-per-search pricing model, and very low ingestion cost.

Planning your use of Data Tiers 

If you do not specify a data tier, all data ingested into Sumo Logic will go to the Continuous Tier. Only data that goes to a partition can go to the Frequent or Infrequent Tiers. You'll need to configure the target tier for the data in a partition on the Partition page.

When planning your use of Data Tiers, it is important to remember the following guidelines:

• The General Index cannot be changed, and it is always in the Continuous Tier.
• The tier where you assign your data governs how you can search and analyze the data. The table below shows capabilities that are available in each tier. 

The amount of data you can ingest to the Frequent or Infrequent Tier is defined by your Sumo Logic account plan. For more information, contact your Sumo Logic account representative.

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After a partition is created in a given tier, you cannot change its tier. If you decide the data should be in a different tier, you must decommission the partition and create a new one.

Feature support by tier

How you can search and use your ingested data varies by the Data Tier it resides in, as described in the following table. 

Feature support	Continuous Tier	Frequent Tier	Infrequent Tier
Centralized, secure, multi-tenant cloud-native platform
Data replication across availability zones, data encryption
Interactive queries (UI)	Partitions can be specified, but are optional.	Partition or _dataTier must be specified.	Partition or _dataTier must be specified.
Support for Installed and Hosted Collectors
RBAC support
Support for search operators
Field Extraction Rules
Logs to Metrics
Data Forwarding
Live Tail
Dashboards
Monitors
Scheduled Searches
Scheduled Views
API Queries

Assigning data to a Data Tier

You assign data to a Data Tier at the partition level. When you create a partition, you define a routing expression and select the target tier for the data that matches the routing expression. For instructions, see Create a Partition.

Searching Data Tiers 

For information about searching data tiers, see Searching Data Tiers.

Common error messages

This section describes the most common error messages for Data Tiers.

• If you try to add a panel to a dashboard that uses data from the Frequent or Infrequent Tiers, you'll receive the following error message, because you can only use data from the Continuous Tier in a dashboard: This query is not supported in Dashboards/Scheduled Searches because it is not in the Continuous Analytics tier. Please modify query and try again.
   
• If you try to specify the scope of a Scheduled View or a Scheduled Search using a partition in the Frequent or Infrequent Data tiers, you'll receive this error message: This query is not supported in Dashboards/Scheduled Searches because it is not in the Continuous Analytics tier. Please modify query and try again.

Guides

In this section, we'll introduce the following concepts:

Create and Edit a Partition

Learn how to create and edit a Partition in an Index.

View Details About a Partition

Learn how to view details about a Sumo Logic Partition.

Data Tiers

Get to know about Sumo Logic's Data Tiers feature.

Data Tiers FAQs

Get answers on various FAQs about Data Tiers.

Searching Data Tiers

Learn how to search specific Data Tiers.