Span Size Estimator

Estimate trace ingestion volume and monthly costs from your span attributes and traffic patterns.

Span Attributes

String attributes~50 B each

Numeric attributes~20 B each

Boolean attributes~15 B each

Span events~3 KB each

Span links~40 B each

Estimated span size540 B

Base overhead (37.0%)

String attributes (46.3%)

Numeric attributes (11.1%)

Boolean attributes (5.6%)

Traffic Volume

Spans per second

Effective rate: 100 spans/sec

Daily Spans

8.6M

Monthly Spans

259.2M

Monthly Storage

130.36 GB

Monthly Cost

$65.18

Pricing Tier

Annual estimate: $782.13

How Span Sizing Works

Every trace span has a base overhead of approximately 200 bytes for mandatory fields (trace ID, span ID, parent span ID, timestamps, status). Attributes, events, and links add to this base size.

String attributes average 50 bytes each (key + value). Span events (like exception events) are much larger at approximately 3 KB each because they include timestamps, names, and their own attribute sets.

These are estimates based on typical OTLP protobuf encoding. Actual sizes vary with attribute value lengths, compression, and backend storage format.

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