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Can I view real-time MTU usage data?

Question

Can I view real-time MTU usage data within the workspace?

 

Product

Twilio Segment

 

Environment

Segment Console

 

Answer

No, Segment does not currently provide real-time MTU usage data.

The Usage page is not updated in real time because MTU counts require deduplication before usage counters can be updated. Usage calculations are based on a UTC cycle. For a given workspace, Segment collects activity up to midnight UTC each day and then performs the counting process before usage metrics are refreshed.

 

MTU Usage Notifications

To help monitor MTU consumption, users can enable Usage & Billing email alerts in their profile settings. When enabled, Segment will send email notifications as you approach your workspace's MTU allocation. Notifications are typically triggered at approximately:

  • 60% of allocated MTUs
  • 80% of allocated MTUs

 

Proactive Monitoring Options

Segment provides several tools that can help monitor usage trends and identify unexpected increases in activity:

  • Source Volume Alerts - Notify your team when event volume exceeds a defined threshold.
  • Observability Public API - Exposes usage and delivery metrics that can be queried programmatically and integrated into your own dashboards, monitoring tools, or alerting systems.

 

Important Limitations

The Observability Public API is not a real-time monitoring solution. Metrics are aggregated and refreshed periodically (typically daily by default), making it useful for trend analysis and operational visibility rather than immediate spike detection.

As a result, it should not be relied upon as the sole safeguard against sudden MTU increases caused by factors such as:

  • Bot traffic
  • Implementation bugs
  • Unexpected identify call behavior
  • Traffic surges or deployment issues

 

Recommended Best Practices

For customers concerned about rapid MTU growth or unexpected spikes, we recommend combining:

  • Source Volume Alerts for threshold-based notifications
  • Internal application monitoring and rate limiting
  • Bot filtering and traffic validation upstream
  • Careful testing and staged rollouts of schema changes, identify calls, and instrumentation updates before production deployment

Using multiple monitoring layers provides the best protection against unexpected MTU increases and allows issues to be identified more quickly.

 

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