Tool
Sampling and ingestion cost calculator
What does your telemetry cost a month, and what sampling percentage keeps it under a daily cap or a budget? Enter what you ingest today; the calculator applies the free allowance, Basic Logs and extra retention at East US list prices, and gives the percentage to set in the classic Application Insights SDK and in the OpenTelemetry distros.
Result
- Volume after sampling
- 182.5 GB/month · 6 GB/day
- Free allowance applied
- 5 GB
- Ingestion cost
- $408.25 per month
- Retention cost
- $0.00 per month
- Total
- $408.25 per month
- Sampling for your target
- 33.33%
- Classic SDK fixed-rate setting
- 33.333%
- OpenTelemetry distro sampling ratio
0.333- At that sampling
- 60.83 GB/month · $128.42 per month
How it adds up
- Volume: 6 GB per day × 30.42 days = 182.5 GB per month with no sampling.
- Analytics Logs: 182.5 GB − 5 GB free = 177.5 GB × $2.30 = $408.25.
- Retention: the 90 days included for Application Insights tables, nothing extra.
- Total: $408.25 ingestion + $0.00 retention = $408.25 per month.
- Daily cap: 2 GB ÷ 6 GB per day × 100% = keep 33.33% of telemetry.
- At 33.33%: 2 GB per day, 60.83 GB per month, $128.42 per month.
How the figures are worked out
- Volume: GB per day, or items per day × average size, with 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes, 1 KB = 1,000 bytes and a month of 30.42 days (365 ÷ 12). It is what you ingest today, so it already reflects the sampling you run now.
- Free allowance: the first 5 GB of Analytics Logs a month are free per billing account, not per resource. The calculator applies all of it, as if nothing else on the billing account used it.
- Ingestion: Analytics Logs GB past the allowance × $2.30, plus the Basic Logs share × $0.50. Only
AppTracessupports the Basic plan among the Application Insights tables, and Basic-plan queries are billed per GB scanned, which isn't included here. - Retention: Application Insights tables keep 90 days at no charge. Each extra day holds one more day of Analytics Logs data, billed per GB-month at the analytics or long-term rate, so the monthly charge is GB per day × extra days × the rate once those days have filled. Basic-plan rows keep their own 30-day query window and are left out.
- Sampling for a daily cap: cap ÷ GB per day × today's sampling percentage, at most 100%. A daily cap is a fuse, not a budget: when it is reached, collection stops for the rest of the day, and data over it is still billed.
- Sampling for a budget: the largest percentage whose ingestion and retention together fit the budget, counting the free allowance. Sampling scales every table alike; metrics and performance counters are never sampled, so real savings are slightly smaller.
- Classic SDK setting: the classic Application Insights SDK's fixed-rate sampling only supports percentages close to 100/N for a whole number N, so the calculator rounds down to the nearest one (50, 33.3, 25, 20, …). Rounding down keeps you under the target.
- OpenTelemetry ratio: the distros take a sampling ratio between 0 and 1 (for example
SamplingRatioin .NET); the figure is the percentage rounded down to three decimals. Their default is rate-limited sampling (traces per second), which you replace with the ratio.
Prices used
East US pay-as-you-go list prices in USD, checked October 21, 2026. Your region, currency, commitment tier or agreement discount change the numbers; the pricing guide explains each line of the bill.
| Meter | Price | Unit |
|---|---|---|
| Analytics Logs Data Ingestion | $2.30 | 1 GB, after the first 5 GB a month |
| Basic Logs Data Ingestion | $0.50 | 1 GB |
| Analytics Logs Data Retention | $0.10 | 1 GB/Month |
| Data Archive | $0.02 | 1 GB/Month |
Finding your volume and average item size
Your own data gives a better number than any default, and Microsoft doesn't publish typical sizes per table. In
the Log Analytics workspace behind the Application Insights resource, every table has a standard
_BilledSize column with each record's billed size in bytes. Query AppRequests,
AppDependencies, AppTraces and the other App* tables there, and divide a
day's total by its row count, per table if their sizes differ a lot. The
telemetry volume by table query does the totals.
Your inputs
The calculator does its arithmetic in your browser and does not send your inputs to our server. Standard server logs and analytics still apply, as described in the privacy notice.
Sampling keeps whole operations together and records how many items each kept one stands for, so counts stay recoverable. Read the sampling glossary entry for the kinds of sampling and how they differ from filtering.