Comment by physicles

I can't get over how expensive these observability platforms are.

Last I looked (and looked again just now), if we were to take all our structured logs from all services and send them to Datadog with our current retention policy, it would just about double our current IT spend.

Instead, we use Grafana + Loki + ClickHouse and it's been mostly maintenance-free for years. Costs under $100/month.

What am I missing? What's the real value that folks are getting out of these platforms?