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Audit domain · 3 checks

Dynatrace Grail audit: buckets, retention and what storage really costs

Three checks on Grail storage — every bucket, the retention it actually carries, and that retention priced against your rate card and annualised.
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What these checks read

Bucket inventory

Every bucket, its type, and whether it is one you created or one that came with the tenant.

Retention per bucket

The retention period each bucket carries, against the default and against what the data in it is used for.

Annualised storage cost

Retention priced on your negotiated rate, per bucket, per year.

Why it matters

Grail retention is the clearest example in the product of a setting that costs money quietly. It is a number in a field. Nothing about changing it feels like a purchase, and nothing about leaving it feels like a decision.
On the tenant in our case study, the default metrics bucket carried 462 days of retention. Nobody had chosen 462; it was an artefact of an earlier configuration that survived a migration. Priced against that customer’s rate card the range was $22,455–$86,115 a year, the spread depending on which of two contractual rates applied — and the report gave both rather than picking the flattering one.
The point of the check is not that long retention is wrong. Compliance frequently requires it. The point is that it should be an answerable question: which bucket, how long, why, and what it costs. Today, in most tenants, the first three are unknown and the fourth has never been calculated.
A finding from a real tenant
Default metrics bucket at 462 days retention
Scale
1 bucket
Impact
$22,455–$86,115 / year
Every finding ships with the source behind it and a CSV of the objects it found, so your team can re-run the check without us.

Questions we get about this domain

Does reducing retention delete existing data?

Yes — lowering a bucket’s retention discards records older than the new window, and that is not reversible. The report therefore quantifies the cost and names the bucket, and leaves the change to you after you have checked what the data is used for.

How do you price storage without seeing our contract?

You give us the rate card, or the two candidate rates. The audit never guesses at list price and never prices in a currency you do not buy in; where the rate is ambiguous the finding shows the range, as it did in the case study.

The other audit domains

Nineteen domains, 71 checks, one read-only run. Each domain is a page.
FinOps Where the money goes, and what is recoverable Kubernetes Cluster coverage, versions, recurring failures Alerting Whether an incident would actually reach a human Audit log Who changed what, when, and outside business hours Coverage What is monitored, what only looks monitored RUM Real-user monitoring reach and privacy settings Grail Buckets, retention, annualized storage cost Pipelines Ingest processing, masking, drop rules Synthetic Synthetic monitors that pass, fail, or never run Topology Entity detection quality and entity explosion OpenTelemetry OTel sources and dual instrumentation Security Token scopes, expiry, dormant credentials Workflows Automation that fails or never fires Bizevents Business event provider hygiene Dashboards Dashboard inventory Davis Root-cause attribution rate OpenPipeline Route and pipeline resolution SLO SLO definitions that break on re-detection Tagging Environment tagging convention

See what this domain finds on your own tenant.

One read-only run covers all nineteen domains. You keep the report either way.
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