Estimate log storage needs based on event volume, retention period, compression, and replication. Plan infrastructure and optimize costs for logging pipelines.
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Log management is critical for observability, debugging, compliance, and security. Our Log Storage Calculator helps you estimate storage requirements based on your log volume, retention policies, compression settings, and replication needs—so you can plan infrastructure and budget accurately.
Log storage calculation estimates the disk space needed to store log data over a retention period. It accounts for factors like average event size, daily event volume, compression ratios achievable with algorithms like gzip or zstd, index overhead for search capabilities, and replication for high availability.
Log Storage Formula
Storage = (Events/Day × Size × Retention Days / Compression) × (1 + Index%) × Replication FactorKnow exactly how much storage to provision for your logging pipeline. Avoid running out of space during incidents when logs spike.
Storage costs add up quickly at scale. Understanding your requirements helps you choose the right storage tiers and retention policies.
Many industries require specific log retention periods (PCI-DSS: 1 year, HIPAA: 6 years). Calculate the storage needed to meet compliance.
Compare pricing across log management vendors by understanding your actual data volume and storage needs.
Plan ahead for growth. If your application traffic doubles, your log volume likely will too.
Balance storage costs against operational needs. Understand the cost impact of different retention periods.
When deploying an ELK stack, calculate the storage needed across your data nodes. Account for Elasticsearch's index overhead (typically 15-20%) and replica shards for fault tolerance.
Estimate monthly costs for services like AWS CloudWatch, Datadog, Splunk, or Grafana Loki. Convert storage requirements to pricing based on each vendor's model.
Container logs can grow rapidly. Calculate storage for stdout/stderr logs across all pods, accounting for log rotation policies and central aggregation.
SIEM solutions require long retention for security logs. Calculate the storage impact of 1-year or 7-year retention policies for compliance.
When migrating to cloud or new infrastructure, estimate log storage needs to size your new environment correctly from day one.
Analyze if you're over-provisioning storage. Perhaps you can reduce retention from 90 to 30 days for non-critical logs and save 66% on storage costs.
It varies by log type: Simple application logs: 200-400 bytes. Web server access logs: 300-800 bytes. JSON-structured logs: 500-2000 bytes. Security/audit logs: 500-2000 bytes. If unsure, start with 500 bytes as a reasonable estimate.