# Data Tiering

> Last9 supports automatic data tiering of metrics based on retention policies and query range limits which allows long term retention of time series data without any downsampling or rollups.

Source: https://last9.io/docs/long-term-storage-with-data-tiering/

Last9 supports automatic data tiering of the metrics based on retention
policies. Leveraging this underlying storage capability, Last9 can store data
for long-term durations without downsampling or rollups. It enables traffic
shaping of time series data by creating access policies tailored for specific
use cases. It is a fundamental differentiator, making Last9 a time series
data warehouse built for long-term retention and superior performance.

Each Data Tier has a retention period, which dictates how long it will retain
the data, and a query range, which dictates how far in the past one can query.

Additionally, its tier has a query depth, which decides how much one query is in
a single query.

## Blaze Tier

Ideal for Alert Manager, real-time, shallow consumption of data. Retains data
for two hours. It has delta caching enabled for faster queries.

## Hot Tier

Ideal for quick daily trends and impact history of recent changes and fixes.
Retains data for six months. Best for exploratory workloads such as Grafana
dashboards.

## Cold Tier

Ideal for long-term data exploration and analysis. Last9 offers long-term
retention of a year of data retention without any rollups or downsampling out of
the box. This is customizable as per customers' requirements and reliability
requirements and can be extended even further.

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![Last9 Cluster: Data Tiers](../../../../../assets/content/docs/levitate/overview/data-tiering/46a3046-image.png)

You can access the tiers from a Last9 cluster's data tiers tab.

## How does it work under the hood?

Last9 automatically tiers the data. Users do not have to do anything special.
You can follow the instructions in the Last9 onboarding guide and start
sending metrics, which will be automatically tiered based on the retention
policies. After that, you can create read tokens for specific tiers from the
_Policies_ section.

More about reading data from different tiers can be found in the
[Read data from Last9](/docs/grafana-config/) guide.