The Ballooning Costs of Metrics: Why Your Monitoring Data and Bill Get Out Of Hand
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We all collect logs, metrics, traces, and possibly other telemetry data. Yet, this can get expensive pretty quickly, especially in today’s cloud-native and microservices-based systems. Why is that? How is it related to the “cardinality problem”? And how can we proactively manage this data surge and keep the associated costs under control?
I decided to delve into this intricate cost challenge in a recent episode of OpenObservability Talks, with the help of my guest Ben Sigelman, co-founder and the GM of Lightstep. Ben architected Google’s own planet-scale metrics and distributed tracing systems (still in production today), and went on to co-create the open-source OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects, both part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).