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Your plan carries several allowances. They are not all enforced the same way, and knowing which is which tells you what will actually happen when you cross one.

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What your plan carries

Exceeding a volume allowance does not stop your ingest. There is no automatic cut-off on logs, metrics, traces, services or synthetic checks — telemetry keeps arriving and stays queryable.This is deliberate: dropping a customer’s telemetry at midnight on the 20th is how you lose the incident you were paying to be able to investigate. Sustained overage is handled commercially, on your invoice or by your account contact, rather than by silent data loss.It also means you will not be warned by a failure. Watch Settings → Usage if the bill matters to you.

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Seats fail open, on purpose

The seat check is the one commercial limit that refuses an action. If the check itself cannot run — no plan on record, no limit set, or a lookup that times out — the user is added rather than blocked. Locking an administrator out of adding a colleague because a billing lookup was slow is worse than one unbilled seat, and it is recoverable in both directions. Every such case is logged, so it surfaces on our side rather than yours.

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Watching your usage

Settings → Usage shows the current calendar month against your plan: records per signal, an approximate volume in gigabytes, percent of allowance used, your retention window and your plan name. It is cached for five minutes, so it lags a burst slightly.
The gigabyte figure is an approximation, derived from record counts using typical per-record sizes — roughly 1 KB per log line, 2 KB per span, 200 bytes per metric sample. Your actual bytes depend on how many attributes you attach. Treat it as a scale indicator, not an invoice.The record counts themselves are exact.
The same numbers are available from the API — see Usage and billing in the API reference — if you want them on your own dashboard or in a monthly report.

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Ingest limits, which are different

Plan allowances are monthly and commercial. Ingest limits are per-request and technical, they apply on every plan, and they do reject:
  • A request rate ceiling, applied per license key.
  • A maximum request body size.
  • Per-request caps on Prometheus remote-write payloads: series, samples, labels per series and label length.
  • A timestamp window — samples too far in the past or the future are rejected rather than stored somewhere you will never find them.
The exact figures, the status codes and what to do about each are on Ingest endpoints, which is the page to open when something is being refused right now.
429 is an ingest rate limit; there is no plan-allowance equivalent. If you are being rate limited, batch harder — a Collector between your services and aiAxonIQ turns thousands of small requests into a few large ones and is the standard fix. See Installation overview.

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Feature entitlements

Separately from volume, your plan determines which product areas are enabled: logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, synthetics, security, LLM observability and AgentSight. A request to a disabled area returns 403 UPGRADE_REQUIRED rather than an empty result, so it is unambiguous:
A 403 on ingest and a 403 in the product mean different things. At the receiver it means the signal is not enabled for your key. In the product it means the feature is not on your plan. Both are answered by your account contact rather than by a configuration change on your side.

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Reducing usage

If you are approaching an allowance, the levers in order of return are the same ones that reduce retention cost: drop health-check traffic at the Collector, sample traces, raise log levels in noisy services, and control metric cardinality. Each is covered under Reducing what you store.

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Next

Ingest endpoints

Rate limits, size caps and every status code the receiver returns.

Data retention

How long each signal is kept and why metrics outlive logs.

Sampling

The largest single reduction available on trace volume.