Production Observability Setup
Observability Cost Reduction
Datadog, New Relic or CloudWatch bills that have outgrown their value.
- Turnaround
- 5–7 business days
- Who it is for
- Teams where the monitoring bill has become a line item people ask about.
01 — The problem
Observability vendors price on volume, and volume grows by default. Most estates send far more data than anyone queries, and pay for every byte of it.
02 — What is included
Exactly what you get, and nothing vague.
- Ingest analysis: what is sent, what is queried, and the gap between them
- Log volume reduction through sampling, filtering and tiering at the collector
- Custom metric and cardinality audit against the vendor’s pricing model
- Retention tiering — hot for days, cheap storage for the compliance tail
- Build-versus-buy modelling where self-hosting genuinely wins
03 — What this usually finds
The recurring ones, named up front.
- Debug logs shipped to a paid backend from production
- Custom metrics created per request rather than per service
- Full retention on data queried only in the first 48 hours
- Duplicate agents shipping the same data twice
Listed because they recur, not because they are guaranteed. The audit reports what is actually there.
Next step
Twenty minutes to find out whether this is worth doing.
Every engagement runs under a signed mutual NDA with a read-only IAM role. If the audit would not pay for itself, I will say so on the call.