Technical guidance for observability, search and platform decisions
SAB Consulting publishes practical analysis for engineering and technology leaders responsible for observability cost, Elasticsearch and OpenSearch, Kubernetes telemetry, OpenTelemetry and production AI search.
Observability FinOps: How to Allocate Costs by Team, Service and Environment
How to build observability cost attribution that works: stable identity, ownership above the vendors, shared and unattributed cost, and showback before chargeback.
Read ArticleObservability Cost Optimization: Where Your Logs, Metrics and Traces Budget Actually Goes
The three economic layers behind every observability bill — telemetry generation, platform consumption and operating cost — and the order of operations for reducing them safely.
Read ArticleSplunk to Datadog, Elastic, or OpenSearch: Migration Cost and Architecture Trade-Offs
A vendor-neutral decision framework for evaluating whether to optimize, partially exit or replace Splunk.
Read ArticleDatadog Bill Too High? 12 Configuration Mistakes That Inflate Observability Costs
A practical review of the configuration and governance patterns that cause Datadog spend to grow faster than expected.
Read ArticleHow to Audit Datadog Costs Before Your Next Renewal
The usage, contract, telemetry and architecture evidence required to prepare a credible renewal decision.
Read ArticleDatadog Custom Metrics and Cardinality: How Costs Grow
Why labels and dimensions can create rapid metrics growth, and how to reduce cardinality without losing operational value.
Read ArticleDatadog Logs Pricing: Ingestion, Indexing and Retention Explained
A clear framework for understanding the different stages of log cost and the technical choices that influence them.
Read ArticleDatadog vs OpenSearch: A Practical TCO Comparison
How to compare software, infrastructure, storage, engineering effort, reliability and migration cost instead of comparing list prices alone.
Read ArticleShould You Optimize Datadog or Migrate? A Decision Framework
A structured way to compare optimization, hybrid architecture and migration based on cost, risk, capacity and time to value.
Read ArticleHow to Run a Parallel Observability Migration Without a Big-Bang Cutover
The architecture, validation, data, alerting and rollback principles required for a controlled transition.
Read ArticleOpenSearch vs Elasticsearch for Observability: Cost, Licensing, Performance and Migration Risk
A vendor-neutral decision framework across four operating models — with interactive scorecard, three-year TCO and risk-adjusted TCO calculators.
Read ArticleHow Kubernetes Labels and Container Churn Increase Observability Costs
Why dynamic workloads create telemetry growth and how platform teams can improve collection, allocation and governance.
Read ArticleOpenTelemetry Cost Optimization: Filtering, Sampling and Routing Before Ingestion
How OpenTelemetry can improve control over telemetry volume when processors, pipelines and operating ownership are designed correctly.
Read ArticleNeed guidance on a specific platform challenge?
SAB Consulting helps engineering organizations structure observability, search and platform decisions with evidence-based analysis.