FAQ
Product
How long does it take to integrate Nimbus?
This depends on your specific vendor and your application integration. On average, for customers using the regular datadog agent to forward data, initial setup takes under 5 minutes.
Is Nimbus an observability pipeline? How is it different from other services in this space?
Other services put the burden on you to understand your traffic patterns. Nimbus automatically analyzes your traffic and creates a top N list of high traffic patterns.
Other services make you manually create the rules and filters to create a pipeline. Nimbus automatically generates transforms based on its traffic analysis.
Other services have you sample and drop data to reduce volume. Nimbus applies lossless aggregation which means that you reduce volume without losing visibility.
Do you support other vendors besides Datadog?
Yes. Please reach out to support@nimbus.dev to get details on vendor specific integrations
Logs
Does Nimbus introduce extra latency to my logs?
Nimbus processes logs in near real time - the average message is received and forwarded in under 100ms.
There is a caveat for aggregated logs. These are held in memory (and buffered on disk) until a termination criteria is met (eg. max_events, expire_after_ms, etc). Aggregations can be disabled at any time. Nimbus also has a pause all button that lets you disable all aggregations at once if needed.
Note that Nimbus has built-in rules to not aggregate error logs which means that they will still come through in near real time.
Can I still query for the same data after my logs have been aggregated?
Yes. Because Nimbus uses lossless aggregations to optimize your log volume, you don't end up losing any data. You can find out more in working with aggregated logs
Will this impact my log based monitors?
Short answer - no. Any log based monitor you currently have can be replicated post-aggregation, either with no changes or some small tweaks. When you onboard, a dedicated Nimbus engineer will work with you to ensure that none of your existing monitors will be impacted.
You can find out more in working with aggregated logs.
Will this impact my log based dashboards?
No. See answer above about log based monitors.
Does data get lost when I aggregate?
By default, Nimbus deduplicates common metadata and merges unique values from logs when aggregation. The only field that gets discarded is the timestamp field - Nimbus preserves the start time and adds a timestamp_end field to designate the time interval for the aggregation. You can see examples of what this looks like in the examples
Can I pause transformations during an incident?
Yes. See the pause all section for details.
What if Datadog changes its pricing model to not be event based?
Nimbus is extremely effective at reducing number of events (100X) and very effective at reducing the size of events (40%). So regardless of the type of pricing model, we will be able to deliver significant savings.
Security and Availability
What is your data retention policy?
Nimbus keeps observability data for a period of up to 7 days in order to analyze traffic patterns. It does not store or retain data beyond the observability window.
What is your availability?
Nimbus offers a 99.9% SLA on uptime. See more details here.
Etc
What if I've already committed to an annual commitment?
Even if you've made a commitment, it's likely that you'll exceed the committed usage and have on demand spend (overage) on top of the committed usage. Nimbus can drop the on demand portion to 0 and make sure you don't exceed it.
We can also help you negotiate with Datadog for alternative contracts with your account executive.
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