---
title: Understanding and managing Cockpit ingestion to reduce costs
description: Explore how to control Cockpit usage and pricing, including how to manage and optimize costs by controlling the amount of metrics ingested. Learn to adjust scrape intervals and filter metrics for efficient resource monitoring without unnecessary expenses.
tags: observability cockpit retention metrics logs
dates:
  validation: 2025-11-13
  posted: 2023-06-07
---

This page explains how you can control your usage of Cockpit, primarily by managing your ingestion rate, to help you avoid unnecessary costs.

For more information about how Cockpit is billed, refer to the [Cockpit FAQ](/cockpit/faq/#how-am-i-billed-for-using-cockpit-with-my-scaleway-data).

Cockpit allows you to [push custom metrics](/cockpit/how-to/send-metrics-logs-to-cockpit/) for various resources. Since pricing is based on the number of ingested samples per month, optimizing your ingestion can directly impact your invoice.

## Importance of controlling the rate

If you wish to avoid extra costs, you can define a limit to the number of samples you send to Cockpit.
The following table shows an estimate of the pricing (€0.00000015 per sample) based on the push rate of the sample:


| Sample ingestion rate per seconds | Samples ingested per day | Price per day | Samples ingested per month | Price per month |
|:---------------------------------:|:------------------------:|:-------------:|:--------------------------:|:---------------:|
|                 1                 |         86 400           |   €0.01296    |         2 678 400          |     €0.4017     |
|                10                 |         864 000          |   €0.1296     |        26 784 000          |     €4.0176     |
|                100                |        8 640 000         |    €1.296     |        267 840 000         |     €40.176     |
|               1000                |       86 400 000         |    €12.96     |       2 678 400 000        |     €401.76     |

## How to know my current ingestion rate?

Within the Cockpit dashboard on Grafana, click **Cockpit Overview**. The panel named **Metrics ingestion rate** displays the ingestion rate for samples coming from Scaleway products, and the ingestion rate for your own samples if you look at "Other Metrics".

If you are [using your own Grafana](/tutorials/using-own-grafana/) to visualize metrics, use the following query `sum(rate(observability_cockpit_ingestion_samples_total{is_from_scaleway="false"}[5m])) OR on() vector(0)` to know what your current ingestion rate is.

## How to control the number of samples sent to Cockpit?

### Control the interval between scrapes

A common good practice to control the number of samples you send to Cockpit, is to have a `scrape_interval` of 1 minute.

Let us say you have 1000 samples exposed and a `scrape_interval` of 10s. This means you will have a rate of 100 sample/s and pay around €40 per month.
If you increase the `scrape_interval` to 60s, you will have a rate of 1,66 sample/s, which amounts to around €6.69 per month.

#### Change the scrape interval using Prometheus

If you are using Prometheus to remote write metrics to your Cockpit, you can tweak the `scrape_interval` using the following configuration:

        ```yaml
        global:
            scrape_interval: 60s
        
        scrape_configs:
            ...

        remote_write:
            - url: https://metrics.cockpit.fr-par.scw.cloud/api/v1/push
            headers:
                "X-Token": <your-cockpit-token>
        ```

#### Change the scrape interval using the Grafana agent

Here is an example of a Grafana agent configuration file with a scrape interval of 60 seconds:

        ```yaml
        metrics:
        global:
            scrape_interval: 60s
            remote_write:
            - url: https://metrics.cockpit.fr-par.scw.cloud/api/v1/push
            headers:
                "X-Token": <your-cockpit-token>
        integrations:
        ...
        ```
### Control the metrics you are sending

Another good practice to control the number of samples you send to Cockpit, is to only send metrics that you want into your Cockpit, by filtering what you send.

Here is a configuration example with Prometheus:

        ```yaml
        ...

        remote_write:
            - url: https://metrics.cockpit.fr-par.scw.cloud/api/v1/push
            headers:
                "X-Token": <your-cockpit-token>
            write_relabel_configs:
                - source_labels: [__name__]
                    regex: 'my_app_metrics(.*)'
                    action: keep
        ```

This configuration will only send metrics starting with `my_app_metrics` to your Cockpit.

For more information, refer to the [Prometheus documentation](https://prometheus.io/docs/prometheus/latest/configuration/configuration/#relabel_config).

### Learn about the agents you are using

Many agents, such as `cadvisor` and `node_exporter` expose a lot of metrics by default.

The [following metrics collectors](https://github.com/prometheus/node_exporter#enabled-by-default) are enabled by default on a node_exporter. You can configure them to filter what is sent to your Cockpit.

Use the following configuration example for a Grafana agent with the `node_exporter` integration:

        ```yaml
        ...
        integrations:
        node_exporter:
            enabled: true
            # Anything not provided in the list below will be disabled by default
            set_collectors:
            - uname
            - cpu
            - loadavg
            - meminfo
            - filesystem
            - netdev
        ```