I’ve tackled this question before: how much should my observability stack cost? While the things in that post are true now as ever, I did end on one somewhat vague conclusion. When it came to figuring out exactly what you need in your stack by drawing a straight line from the business case to the money you spend, my conclusion was that “it depends.” That’s how we approached pricing at Honeycomb: it depends on your needs, so we should give you many different options.

At Honeycomb, we’ve been listening to your feedback. You want easier ways to predict usage and scale your observability spend with your business. What would it look like to meet you where you already are, using similar terms, and give you more control with a simpler experience? We think that means reimagining the customer experience into one that centers around an event-based model. But what exactly is an event? What does that mean for your team’s observability journey?

Observability is more than tooling. Of course having the right tools in place so you can ask arbitrary questions about your environment, without having to know ahead of time what you wanted to ask, is critical. Finding the unknown unknowns is the coveted observability sweet spot. However, it’s the actual doing it that proves a bit more challenging especially when you’re weaning off legacy tools.