Why is observability so expensive?
mattklein123.dev
Why is observability so expensive?
1–10 of 15 posts
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#2Because Si Valley startups love to buy services from their VCs' portfolio companies without regard to their cost?
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#3A lot of words without any concrete proposals on how to solve the problem.
Telemetry is captured because after-the-fact analysis can’t be done retrospectively otherwise. If you can solve that time travel problem, people would capture less telemetry. I think the key thing is if you can do anomaly detection to capture the rare events because 90% of telemetry is garbage happy case telemetry that doesn’t really give you any extra insight. But doing that anomaly detection cheaply and correctly is extremely hard.
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#4Because Si Valley startups love to buy services from their VCs' portfolio companies without regard to their cost?
It truly is interesting how much this happens. I felt pressure to use an investor's staffing company at previous jobs.
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#5People put too much junk in their logs. Most logs are irrelevant. Companies have businesses selling logging solutions. They sponsor developer conferences hiding this simple truth.
Just say no to the logging industrial complex.
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#6A lot of words without any concrete proposals on how to solve the problem. Telemetry is captured because after-the-fact analysis can’t be done retrospectively otherwise. If you can solve that time travel problem, people would capture less telemetry. I think the key thing is if you can do anomaly detection to capture the rare events because 90% of telemetry is garbage happy case telemetry that doesn’t really give you…
(author) I agree that solving both time travel and anomaly detection is very important and is in my opinion the solution to this problem, but I was trying to keep this post focused on the problem itself. I will be writing some follow up posts on potential solutions. Thank you for reading and commenting!
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#7Because Si Valley startups love to buy services from their VCs' portfolio companies without regard to their cost?
There's some of that, but even rolling your own on oss software, your infra (compute, storage, network) can start to balloon really rapidly.
TBF, I think this is more of scale problem for medium to larger traffic companies than startups. I've seen this become especially acute when you're transition from a small or medium company and have started to hit those growth curves, and you get socked with these surprise bills. Something that was a tiny line item suddenly becomes... bad.
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#8People put too much junk in their logs. Most logs are irrelevant. Companies have businesses selling logging solutions. They sponsor developer conferences hiding this simple truth. Just say no to the logging industrial complex.
Lol. I recall hearing DataDog bragging about one of their customers having a $65 million dollar bill. The logging industrial complex is real.
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#9People put too much junk in their logs. Most logs are irrelevant. Companies have businesses selling logging solutions. They sponsor developer conferences hiding this simple truth. Just say no to the logging industrial complex.
I think I'm going to make "Just say no to the logging industrial complex" stickers! ROFL.
Re: Why is observability so expensive?
#10it’s not.
stuff logs into s3. learn to mine them in parallel using lambda or ec2 spot. grow tech or teams as needed for scale. never egress data and never persist data outside of the cheapest s3 tiers. expire data on some sane schedule.
data processing is fun, interesting, and valuable. it is core to understanding your systems.
if you can’t do this well, there is probably a lot more you can’t do well either. in that case, life is going to be very expensive.
it’s ok to not do this well yet! spend some portion of your week doing this and you will improve quickly.