Observability Practical By Samson Tanimawo, PhD Published Jul 2, 2026 4 min read

The Trace Storage Tier Strategy

Traces are bulky. Hot/warm/cold tiers cut cost without losing debugging value. The transitions and queries by tier.

Hot: 24 hours

Full retention, fast queries. Used for live debugging and incident response.

Most expensive tier; right-size to the team's active debug window.

Sampled retention. The error and slow traces stay; healthy ones get pruned.

Useful for postmortems within the week. 90% cheaper than hot.

Aggregated only. Per-trace not retrievable; aggregates and exemplars are.

Compliance and trend analysis. Sampling artifacts are fine at this level.