# Data retention for prometheus & QAN for PMM appliance.

**URL:** <https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095>\
**Category:** PMM 1.x\
**Created:** [January 2, 2018, 3:36pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095 "2018-01-02T15:36:11Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 6\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![single.track.mind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@single.track.mind](https://forums.percona.com/u/single.track.mind)\
**Post date:** [January 2, 2018, 3:36pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095/1 "2018-01-02T15:36:11Z")

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I see the doc’s mention how to manage this if running PMM in Docker, but can’t seem to find out how to change the retention period for QAN and prometheus in the appliance. Any insight would be great. Thanks.

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**Author:** ![bckim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/67e7ee/32.png) [@bckim](https://forums.percona.com/u/bckim)\
**Post date:** [January 4, 2018, 6:48pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095/2 "2018-01-04T18:48:43Z")

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as I know

we can manage the retnetion period for QAN and prometheus like this :

docker run -d   
-p 80:80   
-e METRICS\_MEMORY=32212254720 -e METRICS\_RETENTION=2160h -e QUERIES\_RETENTION=2160h   
–volumes-from pmm-data   
–name pmm-server   
–restart always   
percona/pmm-server:latest

–note added by Percona Community Manager, going forward using pmm-server:n rather than pmm-server:latest is best practice, our advice changed since the user wrote this post. In this case pmm-server:1 would have been appropriate for these code examples.

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**Author:** ![single.track.mind](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/43a26b/32.png) [@single.track.mind](https://forums.percona.com/u/single.track.mind)\
**Post date:** [January 5, 2018, 12:34pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095/3 "2018-01-05T12:34:15Z")

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I see you running PMM in docker. That’s not my situation.

To be clear, i’m trying to change retention for the PMM Virtual Appliance running in a virtualized environment.

Thanks.

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**Author:** ![hostedpower](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/hostedpower/32/18934_2.png) [@hostedpower](https://forums.percona.com/u/hostedpower)\
**Post date:** [April 27, 2018, 6:00pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095/4 "2018-04-27T18:00:13Z")

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want to know this as well, any info? 🙂

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**Author:** ![Mykola](https://sea1.discourse-cdn.com/flex019/user_avatar/forums.percona.com/mykola/32/30_2.png) [@Mykola](https://forums.percona.com/u/Mykola)\
**Post date:** [May 3, 2018, 12:59am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095/5 "2018-05-03T00:59:32Z")

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HI

First of all - it is not recommended to do any changes directly in configs.  
Potentially you can get broken system because PMM has configuration service which also makes changes in configs.  
PMM Team is working on adding “Setting page” for all kind of images.

for METRICS\_MEMORY it is not needed to change anything, it changes automatically according to your instance size.  
if you want to change anyway, fix --storage.local.target-heap-size option inside /usr/lib/systemd/system/prometheus.service  
for METRICS\_RETENTION change --storage.local.retention value inside /etc/sysconfig/prometheus  
for QUERIES\_RETENTION change INTERVAL in /etc/cron.daily/purge-qan-data

please remember - after such changes, you can get a broken PMM during some actions like - external exporters adding, etc.

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**Author:** ![Bronco](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/76d3ee/32.png) [@Bronco](https://forums.percona.com/u/Bronco)\
**Post date:** [May 21, 2018, 8:30am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/data-retention-for-prometheus-qan-for-pmm-appliance/6095/6 "2018-05-21T08:30:13Z")

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Hi,  
I think that the file to be modified is

vi /etc/supervisord.d/pmm.ini  
… --storage.local.retention=1440h0m0s …  
a stop start of the pmm-server is required for changes to be efective.