Information production

Observability spending grows faster than engineering value.

Observability spending grows faster than engineering value.

Observability spending grows faster than engineering value.

SAB reviews Datadog, Elastic, OpenSearch, Splunk, logs, metrics, traces, retention, indexing, telemetry volume, and vendor cost traps to reduce spend without weakening the signals engineers need during production incidents.

Telemetry grows silently

Logs, metrics, and traces expand faster than business value or engineering usefulness.

Retention goes unreviewed

Teams keep low-value data for too long while critical signals remain hard to find.

Cost ownership is split

Platform teams pay the bill while application teams generate much of the volume.

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The problem

Observability spend grows silently until it becomes a platform-level business problem.

Observability spend grows silently until it becomes a platform-level business problem.

Observability spend grows silently until it becomes a platform-level business problem.

Teams keep too much low-value telemetry. Retention policies are rarely reviewed. Logs, metrics, and traces grow faster than business value. Engineers still miss the right signals during incidents because volume is not the same as visibility.

Teams keep too much low-value telemetry. Retention policies are rarely reviewed. Logs, metrics, and traces grow faster than business value. Engineers still miss the right signals during incidents because volume is not the same as visibility.

Common patterns

Platform teams inherit the bill

Application teams create telemetry volume, but platform or cloud teams are left explaining the spend.

Dashboards multiply, signal does not

More dashboards and alerts do not guarantee better incident response or better decisions.

Vendor pricing becomes the architecture

Datadog, Elastic, OpenSearch, Splunk, and cloud telemetry costs shape behavior when policy is unclear.

What SAB reviews

The review separates useful production visibility from expensive telemetry habit.

The review separates useful production visibility from expensive telemetry habit.

The review separates useful production visibility from expensive telemetry habit.

Telemetry volume

Where logs, metrics, and traces grow faster than production usefulness.

Retention policy

Which data deserves long retention, short retention, or no retention.

Indexing strategy

How indexing choices affect cost, search speed, storage, and incident response.

Dashboards and alerts

Which dashboards and alerts support action, and which create noise.

Cost allocation

How to show teams the cost of the telemetry they create.

Vendor lock-in

Where Datadog, Elastic, OpenSearch, Splunk, or cloud-native costs limit leverage.

Team ownership

Who owns volume, retention, signal quality, and cleanup decisions.

Optimization paths

Where to optimize, migrate, renegotiate, or change policy first.

What you receive

A practical decision pack for reducing spend without creating operational risk.

A practical decision pack for reducing spend without creating operational risk.

A practical decision pack for reducing spend without creating operational risk.

The output is designed for both executive review and platform implementation. It identifies where money is going, what can change safely, and what the first 90 days should look like.

The output is designed for both executive review and platform implementation. It identifies where money is going, what can change safely, and what the first 90 days should look like.

Cost driver analysis

Retention and signal policy recommendations

Architecture review

Vendor leverage opportunities

Team ownership model

30/60/90-day implementation roadmap

Executive-ready decision pack

Built for teams accountable for visibility, spend, and production operations.

Built for teams accountable for visibility, spend, and production operations.

Built for teams accountable for visibility, spend, and production operations.

CTO · VP Engineering · Head of Platform · SRE Manager · Observability Lead · FinOps Lead · Cloud Platform Team

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© 2026 SAB Consulting. Senior technical consulting for engineering leadership.

© 2026 SAB Consulting. Senior technical consulting for engineering leadership.

Paris, France · Remote across Europe & North America