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What are Druva Credits?
What are Druva Credits?
Druva operates on a credit-based consumption model where one credit covers the cost of storing 1TB of compressed or deduplicated data for one month. This provides a transparent, predictable pricing structure.
Why does Druva use a credit system?
Why does Druva use a credit system?
Credits are designed to simplify resource management by tying them directly to your storage, retention, and backup usage. This creates a flexible, consumption-based model, ensuring you only pay for the resources you actually use.
How are credits purchased and calculated?
How are credits purchased and calculated?
Credits are purchased as part of your subscription agreement, and Druva's sales team can help accurately size your initial purchase based on estimated data storage needs. They are calculated in TB-Months, meaning one credit protects 1 TB of deduplicated backup data in the cloud for one month. For example, if you need to protect 10 TB of deduplicated data every month for a year, you would need to purchase 120 credits.
What is a credit term?
What is a credit term?
A credit term is the specific duration during which your purchased credits are available for you to consume. This term is specified in your contract and is displayed on the Credit Consumption Report page in the Management Console.
Will I lose my unused credits?
Will I lose my unused credits?
No, you can carry over up to 20% of your purchased, unused credits to your next renewal cycle to help manage your budget flexibility.
What factors influence my credit consumption?
What factors influence my credit consumption?
Your credit usage is primarily impacted by the amount of data backed up, backup frequency, retention policies, and the type of workloads protected, since deduplication rates vary by workload. Workload expansion and system misconfigurations can also lead to increased credit consumption.
How can I monitor and report on my credit usage?
How can I monitor and report on my credit usage?
You can monitor usage directly in the Druva portal using Account Details to view your balance and enabled cost-saving features, and Analytics to visualize trends and find areas for optimization. Additionally, Druva offers three key reports:
Storage Consumption Report: Displays daily storage usage per server.
Credit Consumption Report: Provides a monthly overview of credit usage across your tenant.
Credit Consumption by Backup Sets Report: Details the monthly credit consumption per server.
How can I optimize my credit usage to save costs?
How can I optimize my credit usage to save costs?
You can optimize your consumption in three main ways:
Exclude non-critical data: Configure your backups to protect essential data while skipping non-critical content.
Optimize retention policies: Reduce your retention periods as much as possible without compromising your recovery objectives.
Leverage cost-saving features: Use Long Term Retention (LTR) to achieve up to 20% savings, or move eligible data to the Archive Tier to save up to 50%.
What are early deletion fees for LTR data and how do they impact my credits?
What are early deletion fees for LTR data and how do they impact my credits?
Long Term Retention (LTR) uses a cold tier (via Amazon Glacier Deep Archive) to provide approximately 20% cost savings. If data stored in the LTR tier is deleted before it has been stored for at least one year, an early delete fee is applied charged to your credit balance.
How the fee is calculated
The fee is determined by the volume of data deleted and the number of months remaining in the 12-month commitment:
Early Delete Fee (credits) = 0.35 * (12 - Months in cold tier) * (Data deleted in TB)
Example: If you delete 14 TB of data after it has been in the cold tier for only 7 months, a fee of 24.5 credits will be applied:
Early Delete Fee (credits): 0.35 * 5 * 14 = 24.5 credits
What if I need more credits or need help managing them?
What if I need more credits or need help managing them?
If you need to adjust your credit allocation, you can contact your Druva sales representative at +1-800-375-0160 or sales@druva.com. If you need help with credit optimization, usage, or troubleshooting, Druva provides dedicated 24/7 support.
What are the common causes for sudden spikes in my daily change rate?
What are the common causes for sudden spikes in my daily change rate?
Sudden spikes lead to unexpected credit consumption. Common reasons include:
Application log accumulation: Applications like MS SQL generate massive logs. If application-aware agents are not configured to truncate these logs after backup, they continue to grow and are re-scanned as new data every day.
Inefficient data types: Backing up database dumps (
.bak,.dmp), pre-compressed media (MP3, JPEG), or CAD files via NAS agents do not deduplicate well; even minor changes can cause the system to treat the entire file as unique data.Infrastructure and environmental shifts: System upgrades such as VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) resets can force a full scan of the environment, causing the system to back up significantly more data than a standard incremental cycle.
Overly-inclusive backup rules: Policies that accidentally include temporary files, cache folders, or other irrelevant, large-scale data.
Credit utilization optimization
How can I quickly stop avoidable credit burn?
How can I quickly stop avoidable credit burn?
To quickly stop avoidable burn, review your retention period and reduce long‑term monthly backup counts where they are no longer required. You should also move suitable data to cold or archive tiers, keeping age thresholds in mind.
Does disabling a backup set stop it from burning credits?
Does disabling a backup set stop it from burning credits?
No, you should not rely on "disable" alone to truly stop credit burn. Instead, you must delete the backup sets or recovery points and allow the compaction windows to finish.
How should I optimize backups for high-churn applications like MS SQL Servers?
How should I optimize backups for high-churn applications like MS SQL Servers?
For high-churn apps, verify that app‑aware backups and log truncation are functioning correctly. Specifically for MS SQL, avoid using .bak files via NAS and use the dedicated MS SQL agent instead.
What are the best practices for reporting and governance to monitor credits?
What are the best practices for reporting and governance to monitor credits?
Ensure you have the correct administrator roles and permissions to view credit reports, and subscribe to the reports relevant to your specific tenant type and version, such as the MSC Tenant Consumption report for MSPs. Additionally, remove any manual credit‑limit overrides unless they are intentionally set, and expect some UI lag right after renewals occur.
Can I use the Backup-set report to determine exact per backup set costs?
Can I use the Backup-set report to determine exact per backup set costs?
No, you should only use the Backup‑set report as an estimate for per backup set costs. When making decisions based on this data, you must consider deduplication dynamics.
What steps should I take if I hit an overage or my credits expire?
What steps should I take if I hit an overage or my credits expire?
If you experience an overage or hit expiry, involve your Account Executive (AE) or Customer Success Manager (CSM) to process top-ups. These top-ups are designed specifically for tracking overages.
Monitoring and Governance
What tools are available to track my credit health?
What tools are available to track my credit health?
Enterprise Workloads Dashboard provides a high-level view of credit balance and 90-day utilization trends.
Consumption Insights tab offers detailed visualizations, snapshots of usage trends, and projections for when credits might run out.
The Credit Consumption Report tracks high-level burn rates, while the Credit Consumption by Backup Set Report provides granular details per resource. The backup set report is highly effective for quickly investigating anomalies like misconfigured logging or runaway databases before they impact your budget. Ensure you have the appropriate admin roles to access and subscribe to these governance reports.
How can I enforce governance across multiple departments?
How can I enforce governance across multiple departments?
Druva provides built-in tools to ensure tight governance and cost tracking:
Credit limits: Administrators can set customizable usage caps per organization. You can configure automated actions such as sending alerts or entirely disabling backups when usage hits thresholds like 80%, 90%, or 100% of your limit.
Cost allocation: This automated chargeback framework assigns credit usage to specific business units using cost codes and generates monthly departmental billing reports. You can set specific rates (e.g., $/GB/Month) to automatically calculate departmental data protection costs.