Retention
How long ServerOps keeps your logs, what happens when you change plan or cancel, and how the recovery window protects you from losing your audit trail.
Retention
Your retention window is how far back your logs stay searchable and how long we keep them on file. It comes from the Logs plan you have right now:
| Plan | Retention |
|---|---|
| Hobby | 15 days |
| Pro | 180 days |
| Scale | 365 days |
| Custom | negotiated (contact sales) |
Per-dataset retention can be shortened below your plan's limit on the Datasets page. It can never be raised above the plan limit.
Retention follows your current plan, not the day you sent the log
Two things follow from that:
- Upgrade and you see further back. If you upgrade from Hobby (15 days) to Pro (180 days) today, the logs you sent last month at Hobby become searchable again, up to the new 180 day limit. There is no "frozen at the time you sent it" rule.
- Downgrade and the search window shrinks immediately. Going from Pro (180 days) back to Hobby (15 days) means anything older than 15 days disappears from your searches on the next click. The actual deletion happens in the background over the next few hours.
If you need to keep something across a downgrade, export it before the change takes effect.
How downgrades remove old logs
Two things happen when you downgrade:
- Searches snap to the new window immediately. Your next search, alert, dashboard load, or export only sees logs within your new plan's retention.
- The old logs are cleaned up in the background. They are no longer reachable from your account from the moment you downgrade; the physical delete just takes a little time so the cleanup does not impact live search performance.
You do not need to do anything for the downgrade to take effect. It is instant from your perspective.
What happens when you cancel
Cancelling a Logs subscription puts your data through a deliberate cool-down rather than wiping it on the spot. The full path:
- You cancel. Your subscription keeps working through the end of the period you have already paid for.
- Paid period ends. Your org enters a 30 day recovery window:
- New log uploads from your game server are rejected with
subscription_inactive. - The dashboard refuses to run searches and shows a recovery banner with a "REACTIVATE" link.
- Your existing logs stay on file for the whole window. Nothing is deleted yet.
- New log uploads from your game server are rejected with
- You reactivate before the window ends. Click reactivate on the billing page any time during those 30 days; uploads and searches resume within seconds. Your logs are still there in full.
- Window ends. Every log event for your org is permanently deleted on the next cleanup pass. The deletion cannot be reversed.
The recovery window exists for one reason: cancellations are often a mistake. A billing failure, a co-owner who removes the card on file, an expired card during a busy weekend, someone clicking CANCEL when they meant UPDATE PAYMENT. We would rather hold your data for 30 days than wipe your audit trail because of a misclick on the billing page.
If you intentionally want everything gone immediately (an account-deletion request, a GDPR demand from one of your players that forces you to remove a snapshot, leaving the platform deliberately), contact support and we will run an immediate purge.
What stays vs what goes
| Action | Logs you have already sent | Logs sent after the action |
|---|---|---|
| Upgrade (e.g. Hobby to Pro) | Re-appear in searches, up to the new limit. | Subject to the new limit. |
| Downgrade (e.g. Pro to Hobby) | Older than the new retention: hidden from searches immediately, deleted in the background over the next few hours. | Subject to the new limit. |
| Cancel | Held on file for 30 days. Cannot be searched during the recovery window. | None: new log uploads are rejected. |
| Reactivate during recovery | Restored in full. | New log uploads resume. |
| Recovery window ends | Permanently deleted on the next cleanup pass. | None. |
Charts and the timeline view
The retention rules above describe your raw log events: individual rows you can search by player, dataset, message, or payload field, and pull into an export.
The chart data on the dashboard (the timeline sparkline, the project health bar, the data that drives alerts) is stored separately as per-minute summaries. Today, the summary data keeps the same retention as your raw events, so you will not see a difference. If we ever introduce a plan where they differ (for example raw events for 15 days but charts available for 365), it will be spelled out on the pricing page and reflected in the time-range picker.
Reading your current retention
The Datasets page (Logs › Datasets) shows the effective retention for each dataset, which is the lower of:
- Your plan's retention limit
- Any per-dataset override you have set
If the effective retention is not what you expect, the most common reasons:
- You upgraded but the per-dataset retention was set lower under your old plan. The plan limit went up, but your per-dataset value did not move with it. Edit the dataset to lift the value.
- You are inside the cancellation recovery window. The value shown is the last-active retention, displayed for reference; searches return no results until you reactivate.
- An enterprise contract grant is layered on top. If a number looks higher than the table above, that is why. Contact your account manager.
Related
- Datasets: set per-dataset retention overrides.
- Exports: pull a slice of your logs out before a downgrade or cancellation.
Accurate as of 22 May 2026. Plan numbers may have changed since this page was written: the live source of truth is the pricing page. If the numbers here and the pricing page disagree, the pricing page wins.