Over the past year, I have spoken with dozens of engineering teams about their observability pipelines and analyzed their production telemetry directly. The conversations start the same way: costs are growing, leadership wants answers, and the team is under pressure to cut the bill. Names and identifying details below are changed, but the numbers and patterns are real.
A payments company with thousands of engineers spends over $200,000 a month on observability tooling. Their 18-person platform team monitors cost estimates every single day….
