Taming the Observability Cost Crisis

In today's digital landscape, enterprises face a perfect storm of increasing application complexity and soaring observability costs. As organizations continue to embrace microservices, containerization, and heterogeneous technology stacks, the volume of telemetry data required to effectively monitor these environments has expanded exponentially, and so have the bills from commercial observability vendors. 

Let's explore how this challenge emerged and how solutions like pureIntegration's Unified Observability Platform  offer a sustainable path forward.

The Growth of Complexity in Modern Applications

The last five years have witnessed a dramatic transformation in enterprise application architecture. Gone are the days of monolithic applications built on standardized technology stacks. Today's reality is far more diverse:

• Technology democratization: According to a 2024 Stack Overflow survey, 67% of enterprises now allow development teams to select their own programming languages and technology stacks, up from 42% in 2019.
• Microservices proliferation: Gartner reports that by 2023, more than 85% of large organizations had adopted microservices architectures for at least some applications, compared to less than 40% in 2018.
• Container adoption: The CNCF's 2024 Cloud Native Survey found that 93% of organizations are now using containers in production, with the average enterprise running over 250 containerized applications.

This decentralization of technology decisions has delivered significant benefits in terms of developer productivity, recruitment, and innovation. However, it has also created much greater complexity in monitoring and maintaining these heterogeneous environments.

The Telemetry Data Explosion

This shift toward more decentralized, modular systems comes with a tradeoff: greater complexity introduces far more moving parts to observe, diagnose and optimize.  The more services and layers you introduce, the more telemetry you need to collect to keep systems reliable, performant and secure.

Modern applications generate vast amounts of telemetry data across three key dimensions: Metrics, Distributed Traces and Logs.  According to IDC, the average enterprise now collects over 10TB of observability data per day — a five-fold increase from 2019. 

This explosion in data stems from several factors: the aforementioned increase in service components to monitor, higher cardinality of attributes with the data, shorter collection intervals, and the greater need to instrument across all layers of the software and infrastructure stack.

The Commercial Observability Cost Crisis

While this deeper instrumentation has enabled better insights into service assurance,it also brings a hidden ‘feature’: more data means more dollars to monitor.  Enterprises aren’t just collecting more telemetry, they’re paying more to store, process an analyze it, especially when using commercial vendor tools.  

A 2023 Forrester Research study found that enterprises' annual spending on observability tools increased by an average of 212% between 2019 and 2023. For many organizations, annual observability costs now exceed $1 million, with some large enterprises spending $10 million or more.

Most vendor pricing models are based on: volume of data ingested, length of data retention, number of instances of architecture components monitored, and features and capabilities enabled.

These pricing factors of commercial tools, combined with increases in data volumes, have led to several counterproductive behaviors that reduce overall visibility and reliability:

• Sampling data instead of collecting everything
• Reducing retention periods below operational requirements
• Creating "blind spots" by turning off monitoring for less critical components
• Making architectural compromises to reduce telemetry generation

An Alternative to Commercial Tools

Responding to this crisis, many forward-looking organizations have turned to open source observability solutions. The open source ecosystem is vast, with solutions covering many aspects of observability.  

While open source solutions offer a path to cost control without sacrificing visibility, they bring their own challenges:

• Integration complexity across multiple projects to create full solutions
• Operational overhead for maintenance
• A multitude of choices to solve the same problem – which projects do you chose to utilize, and will they be the long-term best choice?
• Feature set gaps, such as synthetic user experience monitoring, anomaly detection, and outage prediction, that require custom capability creation
• Lack of often-required enterprise support
• Complexity in scaling, availability and upgrades
• The need for specialized expertise

The pureIntegration Unified Observability Platform

This is where pureIntegration's Unified Observability Platform comes in.  We’ve taken over 15 years’ experience working with both large, Fortune 500 companies as well as smaller enterprises to develop opinionated strategies and hardened, supported configurations that allow enterprises to confidently make the transition away from cost prohibitive commercial vendors.  The platform leverages best-of-breed open source tools while addressing the key challenges through:

1. Pre-selected components: Ready-to-deploy configurations that work together seamlessly
2. OpenTelemetry foundation: Full support for the open standard, enabling vendor independence
3. Adoption framework: Our approach to migration, from strategy, prioritization and roadmap through commercial tool sunsetting
4. Codeless synthetic monitoring: User experience monitoring and codeless QA without requiring developer-level resources to scale
5. Production-ready deployment: Deployed in enterprises generating millions of timeseries and petabytes of data.
6. Support and expertise: Access to specialists for both support and customization

The Business Impact

Organizations that have taken our Unified Observability approach have gained significant benefits:

• 70-90% reduction in observability licensing costs
• Elimination of observability compromises tied to cst
• Greater flexibility to adapt to changing technology stacks
• Reduced vendor lock-in
• Greater buy-in from software engineering organizations through ease of data exposure and dashboarding
• More complete observability coverage

Discover how pureIntegration's Unified Observability Platform can revolutionize your monitoring approach, reduce costs, and enhance system reliability.

Let’s Start the Strategy over Lunch…On Us!