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Palo Alto Networks Cortex XCOR supports two pricing models: consumption and capacity. Your contract with Palo Alto Networks determines which model applies to your tenant. Each model has its own set of licensing concepts that govern how usage is measured, reported, and controlled.

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Consumption pricing

In the consumption model, your organization purchases a pool of credits over a defined contract period and spends them across any telemetry type. Usage is measured in volume-based units such as persisted series, data points, and bytes, each with a per-unit credit price. The consumption model provides flexibility to shift spend between metrics, logs, and traces as operational needs change. To protect against overspending, configure budgets with thresholds that alert or drop data before credit exhaustion. For the full list of consumption licensing concepts and how each unit is counted, see Consumption licensing.

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Capacity pricing

In the capacity model, your organization contracts for fixed rate limits measured in data points per second (DPPS) and active time series cardinality. Exceeding these limits incurs penalties that can result in dropped data. Capacity limits are enforced across three dimensions: persisted writes, matched writes, and persisted cardinality. To control which data drops first when limits are reached, configure quotas and split total system capacity into per-pool allocations. For the full list of capacity licensing concepts, metrics, and limit management strategies, see Capacity licensing.