Glean Cost Tuning

Glean Cost Tuning

Overview

Glean pricing scales with indexed content volume and per-seat user count, making document indexing volume and search query frequency the primary cost drivers. Enterprise deployments typically connect dozens of datasources, each pushing thousands of documents into the index. Without active content governance, stale drafts, archived pages, and near-empty documents inflate the index by 30-50%, driving up costs with zero search value. Pruning irrelevant content and using incremental indexing are the highest-leverage optimizations.

Cost Breakdown

API Call Reduction

class GleanIndexFilter {
  private staleThreshold = 365 * 24 * 60 * 60 * 1000; // 12 months

  shouldIndex(doc: { status: string; updatedAt: number; title: string; content: string }): boolean {
    if (doc.status === 'draft' || doc.status === 'archived') return false;
    if (Date.now() - doc.updatedAt > this.staleThreshold) return false;
    if (doc.title.startsWith('[Template]')) return false;
    if (doc.content.length < 50) return false;
    return true;
  }

  async incrementalIndex(docs: any[], lastSyncTimestamp: number): Promise<any[]> {
    // Only process documents modified since last sync — reduces indexing calls by 80-90%
    const modified = docs.filter(d => d.updatedAt > lastSyncTimestamp);
    const eligible = modified.filter(d => this.shouldIndex(d));
    return eligible.map(d => ({
      ...d,
      content: d.content.slice(0, 50_000) // Truncate to 50KB
    }));
  }
}

Usage Monitoring

class GleanCostMonitor {
  private indexedDocs = 0;
  private queriesThisHour = 0;
  private budgetDocs = 100_000;

  recordIndexed(count: number): void {
    this.indexedDocs += count;
    const utilization = (this.indexedDocs / this.budgetDocs) * 100;
    if (utilization > 80) {
      console.warn(`Glean index at ${utilization.toFixed(0)}% capacity: ${this.indexedDocs}/${this.budgetDocs} docs`);
    }
  }

  getUtilization(): string {
    return `${((this.indexedDocs / this.budgetDocs) * 100).toFixed(1)}% index capacity used`;
  }
}

Cost Optimization Checklist

• Filter drafts, templates, and archived documents before indexing
• Prune documents not updated in 12+ months
• Use incremental indexing — only process changed documents
• Truncate document bodies to 50KB maximum
• Consolidate overlapping datasource connectors
• Audit user seats quarterly and deprovision inactive accounts
• Skip attachments larger than 10MB
• Monitor index utilization with 80% threshold alerts

Error Handling

Prerequisites

• An approved cost budget, a named content owner for each datasource, and a current count/freshness baseline.
• A staging or dry-run inventory using synthetic identifiers; do not export document bodies, user lists, or query logs to make a cost decision.
• A rollback plan that restores the previous inclusion filter and a written exception process for legal, compliance, or business-record sources.

Instructions

1. Measure document counts, freshness, duplicate rate, and active users by datasource before proposing any exclusion.
2. Classify candidates as draft, duplicate, archived, or stale; send ambiguous records to the source owner instead of automatically deleting them.
3. Run the revised filter as a dry run and compare expected removed count, retained count, and representative synthetic search coverage.
4. Apply a scoped, idempotent change to one datasource, monitor cost and freshness, and halt if relevant content or authorized access regresses.
5. Promote in stages only after the owner accepts the evidence; retain the prior filter revision for immediate rollback.

Output

Return a cost-change receipt with datasource, baseline and projected counts, exclusion categories and counts, owner approval, staged result, search-coverage probe, estimated savings range, and rollback revision. The receipt contains aggregates only.

Examples

Example: source=staging-guides; baseline=12000; proposed_exclusions=900 archived + 120 duplicates; retained=10980; probe=pass; owner=docs-ops; rollback=filter-r18. This is a decision record, not a deletion authorization.

Resources

• Glean Developer Portal
• Glean Pricing

Next Steps

See glean-performance-tuning.