DQL costs when querying spans – looking for advice

michiel_otten — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 06:13:41 GMT

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for advice on managing and controlling query costs in DQL, especially when working with spans.

In my recent experiments, I’ve been querying spans for about 1–2 hours, even with a 500GB limit in a notebook, and I’ve already incurred more than €70 in costs. At that rate, this could scale to roughly €25K per year, which feels quite high for platform usage. Therefore I'm guessing there is a better way to achieve certain informational needs.

I’d love to understand how others are handling this more efficiently. Specifically:

What are best practices to control or reduce query costs when working with spans?
Do you rely on approaches like pre-aggregation (e.g., creating metrics or business events) instead of querying raw spans?
How do you structure or use buckets to reduce the amount of data scanned?
Are there recommended strategies for limiting data (time ranges, filters, sampling, etc.)?
How do you monitor and optimize expensive queries effectively? Do we need to create anomaly detectors?
Any insights, patterns, or real-world examples would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Michiel

topic DQL costs when querying spans – looking for advice in DQL

DQL costs when querying spans – looking for advice