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Similar to data retention being infinite by default, Phoenix also does not gate the deletion of the data. If you no longer need certain projects, traces, datasets, experiments, or prompts, you can delete these resources through the UI as well as through the REST API.

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Project Retention Policies

In Phoenix 9.0 or greater you can automatically purge traces from projects by configuring a retention policy. Retention policies can be either time based or trace count based.

A retention policy starts deleting traces that are outside of the retention window

By default Phoenix comes with 1 project retention policy called Default. Every project in your instance is associated with this retention policy unless specified otherwise. The Default policy also specifies 0 days, which is equal to “Indefinite” retention.

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Configuring the Default Retention Policy

The default retention policy can be configured at deployment time using the PHOENIX_DEFAULT_RETENTION_POLICY_DAYS environment variable. This is particularly useful for self-hosted deployments where you want to set a consistent retention policy across all projects from the start. Environment Variable Configuration:
  • PHOENIX_DEFAULT_RETENTION_POLICY_DAYS=0 (default) - Infinite retention, no automatic cleanup
  • PHOENIX_DEFAULT_RETENTION_POLICY_DAYS=30 - Automatically delete traces older than 30 days
  • PHOENIX_DEFAULT_RETENTION_POLICY_DAYS=7 - Automatically delete traces older than 7 days
When using Helm, you can set this in your values.yaml: 
database:
  defaultRetentionPolicyDays: 30  # Set to desired number of days
Or when using Docker directly: 
docker run -e PHOENIX_DEFAULT_RETENTION_POLICY_DAYS=30 arizephoenix/phoenix
Important Notes:
  • This setting only affects the default retention policy that applies to all projects
  • Individual projects can still override this setting through the Phoenix UI
  • Changes to this environment variable will update the default policy for new projects but won’t affect existing project-specific policies
  • The cleanup runs on a scheduled basis (weekly by default) as configured in the retention policy

By default phoenix retains all the data you send it

If you simply want to preserve a static set amount of traces per project, you can simply adjust the max days traces will be stored in Phoenix and this will be applied to all current and future projects that get created. In some cases you might want to specify a different retention policy for a particular project (e.g. you might want to age out your playground spans quicker than spans from an actual application). In this case you can navigate to the Data Retention tab and create a new policy.

Create a new retention policy to associate with projects

A policy is made up of:
  • name - a human friendly name for others to understand it (e.g. “one week”)
  • rule - number of max days and or number of traces that will cause traces to be purged
  • schedule - a CRON schedule for when the policy will be enforced. It’s recommended to do it during non-business hours for the least amount of disruption (if there is any)
Once you have created a policy you can go to the project config and associate the policy to the project. You must be an admin to perform this action.

Select your new policy in the project config tab


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Deleting Traces Manually

You can either delete traces by time or individually. To delete traces older than a certain date, click on the action button on a project and select remove data

Click Remove Data. You will be able to delete traces older than a certain date.


Select a date. Traces older than the given date will be purged.


How to configure retention policies