Observability costs too much: how teams cut telemetry spend without going blind

Where the money goes

• High-volume, low-value logs.
• Metrics with high-cardinality labels, which multiply the number of series.
• Traces kept at full detail for every request.
• Data kept for longer than anyone looks at it.

Practical levers

• Sampling: keep all errors and slow traces, and a share of the rest.
• Filtering at the Collector: drop noisy events before they are stored.
• Cardinality control: avoid unbounded values, such as user IDs, in metric labels.
• Tiered retention: keep recent data hot and older data cheap.

Stay safe

1. Decide what questions you need telemetry to answer.
2. Measure how often each source is actually used.
3. Cut the unused first and watch for gaps.
4. Review costs per team, regularly.

IICTP is a new independent credential and is not ISO/IEC 17024 accredited.