Retention

ramzes deletes events that are older than a number of days, together with the notifications and deliveries that belong only to them. The default is 30 days. This page says exactly what is deleted, when, and what is not.

The settings

Retention is set under Settings, Instance, and saved with Save settings:

Field	Default	Range	Meaning
Keep events for (days)	30	0 to 3650	Events received longer ago than this are deleted. 0 keeps them forever.
Different retention for some topics	none	0 to 3650 per topic	A number of days for one topic, used instead of the general one. 0 keeps that topic forever.

Over the API these are retention_days and retention_overrides in PUT /api/settings; see the Configuration reference.

A change is used from the next retention pass on. Lowering the number deletes the events that are now too old at that pass.

What counts as old

An event’s age is counted from when ramzes received it, not from the ts the sender gave. An event is deleted when it was received more than the configured number of days ago, counted to the millisecond from the moment the pass runs.

Per-topic overrides

An override names one topic and a number of days:

• The topic is matched exactly. orders.failed covers only that topic. Patterns such as orders.* are not understood here; an entry written that way matches only a topic literally named orders.*.
• A topic with an override is taken out of the general rule entirely. With general retention of 30 days and an override of 7 days for infra.heartbeat, heartbeats are deleted after 7 days. With an override of 0, they are never deleted.
• An override can be longer than the general period as well as shorter.

A common use is a short period for a noisy topic:

{
  "retention_days": 30,
  "retention_overrides": {"infra.heartbeat": 2, "billing.invoice.failed": 365},
  "public_url": "https://ramzes.example.com"
}

What is deleted with an event

When an event is deleted, these go with it:

• its labels;
• its place in every notification it was part of;
• each notification it was part of, once no other remaining event belongs to that notification, together with that notification’s deliveries and their attempts.

So a notification that collected ten events stays, with its deliveries, until the last of those ten events is old enough. A notification that had one event goes with it.

After that, the event’s page shows “This event does not exist. It may have been removed after its retention period.”

What is kept while work is pending

An event that is old enough is still kept when something about it has yet to happen:

• it belongs to a notification with a delivery that is waiting to be sent or being retried;
• it belongs to a notification that is still collecting events or is held (the Waiting tab on the Notifications page).

It is deleted at a later pass, once that work is done.

Caution

A notification that was sent and is still open, neither acknowledged nor resolved, is not protected. When its events pass the retention period it is deleted like any other. Escalation steps and repeats that were still scheduled for it then do nothing. Keep the retention period longer than the time you expect anything to stay open.

The worker that does it

• A retention pass runs when ramzes starts and then every hour.
• It works through the overrides first, then the general rule.
• It deletes in batches of 500 events, each batch in its own transaction, until nothing old enough is left. A large backlog therefore does not hold one long transaction.
• When a pass deleted something, the log has an info line “removed events past their retention” with the number. A pass that fails logs “retention pass failed” and the next one tries again.

There is no command or button to run a pass by hand. Restarting ramzes runs one.

What retention does not cover

These are not events and are trimmed, or kept, by other rules:

Data	Rule
Configuration history	The newest 200 entries are kept
Recorded requests of a source	The newest 20 per source are kept
Silences	Kept until you delete them, including ones that have ended
Sessions	An expired session stops working but its row is not removed. Signing out and removing a user remove sessions.
Users, API tokens, routes, templates, connections, sources	Kept until you delete them

Deleting a source does not delete its events; they stay until retention removes them.

Disk space

With SQLite, deleting rows does not make the database file smaller. ramzes does not vacuum the file. The freed space is reused by later events, so the file stops growing once the amount of data is steady. A copy made with ramzes backup contains no free space; see Backup, export and import.

With Postgres, space is reclaimed by Postgres’s own vacuuming.