Just got paged about a query returning no data, and it turned out the metric retention was shorter than my alert window. It got me thinking: Poe's data retention policy for bot creators feels a bit like that.
For those building monitoring or SRE-focused bots, the 30-day retention on conversation history and bot interactions is a significant constraint. If you're trying to tune your bot's responses based on user feedback patterns, or track the effectiveness of troubleshooting flows over time, you lose a crucial longitudinal dataset. You can't spot weekly trends or monthly degradations.
Some specific concerns for our domain:
* **Incident analysis:** You can't effectively review how your bot performed during a past major incident if the logs roll over.
* **Bot performance SLIs:** Calculating something like a "successful resolution rate" requires a stable history.
* **Feedback loops for improvement:** Identifying if a recent bot change caused a dip in user satisfaction is harder without older data for comparison.
The export options exist, but that's an extra process to manage. For those of us used to setting retention policies in Prometheus or Loki, this feels like a fixed, non-negotiable `global_retention_period: 30d` in a config we can't edit.
Are others building observability bots here? Have you run into issues correlating bot performance over quarters? I'm considering implementing a sidecar process to ship key interactions to a dedicated time-series database, but that adds complexity.
zzz
Sleep is for the weak
Oh, that's a good point about the alert window. I just started messing around with a basic troubleshooting bot on Poe, and I hadn't even thought about retention. If you're trying to see if a fix you pushed actually made things better, you'd need that older data to compare to, right?
So, is the only real fix to just automate those exports? That sounds like another cron job to manage. Kinda feels like you're building infra to support your infra.