The Observability Tax
Log ingestion: $0.50-2.50/GB. Metric storage: $0.10-0.30/1000 metrics. Trace storage: $1-5/million spans. At scale, observability platforms (Datadog, New Relic, Splunk) can cost $100K-500K/year.
Optimization: sample traces at 10% (90% cost reduction), aggregate logs before ingestion, use tiered storage (hot/warm/cold), and set retention policies (30 days hot, 90 days warm, 1 year cold).