Retention and deletion

Retention expires a project's telemetry over time. Project deletion permanently removes the project itself and all project-owned data. Use retention for routine data lifecycle; use deletion only when the entire project is no longer needed.

Both actions require the owner or admin workspace role.

Choose a retention period

Open the project's Settings page and choose one of the current options:

Setting	Effect
7 days	Keeps a short investigation window.
30 days	The default balance for ordinary operational review.
90 days	Supports longer comparisons and incident investigation.
Unlimited	Prevents time-based telemetry expiration.

Select Save retention to apply the change. Lens queues background reconciliation rather than rewriting all retained records during the request.

Know what retention covers

The project retention window applies to telemetry-backed data:

• traces and their spans or observations;
• evaluation results;
• evaluation runs.

Observed evaluation data is derived from reported evaluation telemetry and therefore follows that lifecycle. Managed datasets and workspace or project configuration are not ordinary telemetry and are not removed by the retention window.

When a trace used as alert evidence expires, the incident may remain while its trace is no longer available.

Understand a retention change

Expiration is calculated from each record's own event time, not from the day you change the setting.

• Shortening retention can make older telemetry eligible for deletion as soon as reconciliation and storage cleanup complete.
• Extending retention updates expiration for records that still exist.
• Unlimited moves retained telemetry to a non-expiring horizon.
• No retention change can restore data that storage has already deleted.

Because reconciliation and physical cleanup are asynchronous, old records may remain visible briefly after saving a shorter period.

Choose the period together with capture policy. Full prompt and response capture may require a shorter window or stricter access than metadata-only traces.

Delete the project

Before deletion:

1. Confirm the active project name.
2. Export or back up anything that must be retained.
3. Identify every application using the project's ingestion keys.
4. Decide where those applications should send telemetry next, or stop their exporters.

Open Settings, find Danger zone, select Delete project, and confirm.

Lens then:

1. marks the project as deleting;
2. revokes all project ingestion keys immediately;
3. queues background deletion of traces, observations, and evaluation telemetry;
4. removes the project's database record and project-owned configuration after telemetry cleanup.

The operation has no restore workflow. Project-owned managed datasets, gates, alerts, keys, reviews, and settings are removed with the project through database cleanup.

If deletion remains in progress

Project deletion depends on the maintenance worker. A project can remain in the deleting state if that worker is unavailable or its job repeatedly fails.

Check the worker and queue health before retrying infrastructure changes. Sending with an old key will not resume ingestion because keys are revoked when deletion begins.

For credential-only incidents, revoke the affected key instead of deleting the project; see Ingestion keys.