If you’re an experienced engineer, you likely have comprehensive observability and monitoring set up for your production systems. So if issues arise, you’re empowered to resolve them quickly. Yet, there are way too many systems out there, especially smaller and simpler ones, which are running with only rudimentary observability systems, or no observability at all. This means when an application goes down or starts to perform poorly, it may be very hard to pinpoint and resolve the issue.

You are running a complex, mission-critical application, and you understand you need an advanced Observability solution to efficiently troubleshoot and proactively prevent issues. Yet you have a choice to make—should you choose a “Fully Managed” SaaS solution such as Datadog, Newrelic, or Dynatrace, or should you pick an Open-Source solution that you can host yourself?

I’ve heard this story many times from production engineers: ‘We use tools like Datadog and NewRelic, but to keep costs from skyrocketing, we’re only monitoring our most critical services. We’re storing just 10% of our logs and traces and only the metrics we consider essential. It’s a frustrating situation. Engineers want full visibility across their systems, but cloud storage costs make it impossible to monitor everything.