Observability Is Not Free
Most teams budget for inference costs and forget observability. Real costs: logging/storage (5-10% of inference), evaluation runs (5-10%), drift detection (2-5%), A/B testing infrastructure (3-5%).
Total observability overhead: 15-25% of inference costs. At $10K/month inference, budget $1.5-2.5K for observability. Cutting this budget leads to undetected model degradation.