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Observability Cost Management: When Monitoring Costs More Than What You're Monitoring

Observability platforms can consume 10-20% of your infrastructure budget. Time to optimize.

By Richard Ewing·

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).

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Published Work

This article expands on ideas from my published work in CIO.com, Built In, Mind the Product, and HackerNoon. View published articles →

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Richard Ewing

The Product Economist — Quantifying engineering economics for technology leaders, PE firms, and boards.