Costing for API Calls in Oracle Cloud Monitoring (OCI) in Site24x7

Costing for API Calls in Oracle Cloud Monitoring (OCI)

When integrating Site24x7 with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), metric data is retrieved using the SummarizeMetricsData API. This API is part of OCI monitoring and is used to fetch time series metric data for resources.
Understanding how OCI charges for these API calls helps you plan usage and avoid unexpected costs.

How OCI pricing works for metric retrieval

OCI does not charge per API request. OCI pricing for monitoring is based on datapoints, and it includes both ingestion and retrieval.

Pricing model

Metric Ingestion (data sent to OCI monitoring)
  1. First 500 million datapoints per month: Free
  2. Beyond 500 million datapoints per month: $0.0025 per million datapoints
Metric Retrieval (data fetched via APIs like SummarizeMetricsData)
  1. First 1 billion datapoints per month: Free
  2. Beyond 1 billion datapoints per month: $0.0015 per million datapoints

What is a Datapoint

A datapoint represents a single metric value at a specific timestamp.
For example,
  1. CPU utilization of one instance at one timestamp = 1 datapoint.
  2. 1 metric queried over 60 timestamps = 60 datapoints.
  3. 10 resources with the same query = 600 datapoints.

How Site24x7 uses the API

Site24x7 uses the SummarizeMetricsData API to:
  1. Collect performance metrics like CPU, memory, and network.
  2. Monitor OCI services such as compute instances, databases, and load balancers.
  3. Display historical trends and real-time monitoring data.
  4. Each query made by Site24x7 results in datapoint retrieval, which contributes to OCI billing.

Cost calculation example

Retrieval example (relevant for Site24x7)
Let’s say your monitoring setup retrieves:
  1. 1.2 billion datapoints in a month
Cost calculation:

First 1 billion datapoints → Free
Remaining 200 million datapoints → Charged
Cost = 200 million ÷ 1 million × $0.0015
         = $0.30

Ingestion example (for completeness)
If your environment sends:
  1. 600 million datapoints in a month
Cost calculation:

First 500 million datapoints → Free
Remaining 100 million datapoints → Charged
Cost = 100 million ÷ 1 million × $0.0025
         = $0.25

Factors that impact cost

Your total datapoint usage depends on:
  1. Number of monitored resources
  2. Number of metrics per resource
  3. Query frequency
  4. Time range of each query
  5. Granularity of data (1 min vs 5 mins intervals)

Best practices to optimize costs

  1. Use longer aggregation intervals where possible.
  2. Avoid unnecessary high-frequency polling.
  3. Limit metrics to only what is required.
  4. Monitor your monthly datapoint usage trends.

Key takeaway

OCI monitoring pricing is datapoint-based, not API call-based. Even though Site24x7 uses the SummarizeMetricsData API, your cost depends entirely on how much metric data is retrieved. Staying within the free tier is achievable with efficient monitoring strategies and controlled query patterns.

Related articles
  1. OCI Monitoring

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