Why observability control is about more than just reducing costs

Observability telemetry control isn’t just about cutting costs. The real opportunity is boosting value density: Making every metric, trace, and log more useful relative to its cost. That starts with visibility into how telemetry is used and what it costs, so leaders can decide what’s worth paying for.

True control ensures queries stay fast and efficient, data remains optimized, and developers always have the right signals during incidents. The result: predictable budgets for business leaders, performant queries for engineers, and an observability system that scales without compromise.

For most observability platforms, “control” is positioned narrowly as a way to save money: drop unused data, shrink storage, reduce bills. While cost matters, and often gets leadership’s attention first, it’s not the whole story. Observability isn’t just a budget line item. It’s the backbone of developer productivity and system reliability.

When control is treated only as cost-cutting, teams are left with slower, more expensive queries and gaps in visibility during incidents. Real control means looking at how telemetry is used and what it costs, side by side — then striking the right balance: cost efficiency paired with performance, predictability, and developer outcomes.

It’s tempting to treat observability control purely as a cost exercise. But when you focus only on trimming, whether by dropping metrics, reducing trace sampling, or shunting logs into cold storage, you create the risk of missing signals, slow queries, and friction during incidents. These tactics reduce spend but rarely improve performance or developer experience.

Take an extreme example: if you stopped ingesting the single most expensive metric you pay for, you’d certainly save money. But what would that do to your ability to understand how your system behaves? Chances are, it wouldn’t be good.

The real opportunity lies in maximizing value density: retaining the signals that deliver the most visibility per dollar spent. To achieve this, you need visibility into how your observability data is used relative to what it costs, so you can decide if it’s worth keeping. Sometimes this means swapping out lower-value telemetry for higher-value signals to stay within budget. Making that decision is only possible when usage and cost are understood together.

Control is about being understand usage and cost side by side to:

• Get rid of telemetry that isn’t used.
• Optimize telemetry that is used, based on how it is consumed.
• Anticipate the impact of new telemetry (like a new metric) on your budget, and decide if it’s worth it.

True control balances multiple dimensions. Cost is one of them, but so are performance, value density, and the day-to-day experience of developers. An effective control strategy should account for all of these:

• Cost reduction: Eliminate telemetry that isn’t used or useful.
• Budget predictability: Avoid surprise overages so leaders can plan with confidence.
• Performance: Keep queries fast and efficient at scale. Unoptimized telemetry makes queries slower and more expensive to execute. Optimized data ensures responsiveness without waste.
• Value density: Retain and optimize the signals that deliver the most visibility per dollar.

When these dimensions work together, observability becomes more than a budget exercise. It becomes a way to deliver clarity, speed, and confidence to the teams who rely on it.

Many platforms stop at narrow, cost-focused tactics that cut spend but compromise performance and visibility. Chronosphere takes a broader view. Through the Control Plane, we apply consistent principles of control across metrics, traces, and logs: providing visibility into how telemetry is used, tools to keep costs predictable, and ways to ensure performant queries while maximizing value density.

• Metrics Control: Rollups and aggregations create lower-cardinality versions of time series to keep queries performant. The platform provides recommendations to drop/aggregate unused metrics/labels without compromising existing usage patterns. Quotas help teams manage metric volumes and keep costs predictable, while the Usage Analyzer shows which metrics and labels deliver the most value per dollar.
• Trace Control: Datasets and Behaviors make it simple to capture the traces you need, when you need them. During incidents, teams can boost sampling on critical services instantly, then restore baselines without redeploys.
• Logs Control: Utility scoring highlights which log patterns provide meaningful insight and which don’t. Control Rules reduce low-value entries without losing context, while Volume Analysis reveals growth trends for predictable costs. Logs Quotas give teams autonomy to prioritize what matters most.

This approach enables:

• Leaders to keep spend predictable and avoid runaway growth.
• Developers to resolve issues faster with performant queries, relevant traces, and clear logs that make sense when they need them most.

Control isn’t about cutting for the sake of cost. It’s about ensuring observability data is performant, valuable, and useful across every signal.

When teams focus on cost control without thinking about value and performance, they often fall into patterns that undermine their observability efforts. Some of the most common pitfalls include:

• Blunt cost cutting: Dropping data aggressively to save money, only to lose the signals developers rely on during incidents.
• Telemetry FOMO: Collecting everything “just in case,” driving up costs with low-utility data that never gets used.Ignoring developer experience: Leaving teams with slow queries, irrelevant data, or unclear signals that waste time and lengthen incidents.
• Overlooking value density: Measuring control only by what’s removed, instead of the usefulness of what’s kept.

Chronosphere helps organizations avoid these traps by making it easy to balance cost with performance and value — building observability systems that are lean, performant, and trusted by the people who rely on them in the moments that matter most.

Teams often begin their control journey with cost in mind. And yes, Chronosphere customers see substantial savings — on average an 84% reduction in data volumes and associated costs.

But the outcomes go well beyond spend reduction. By focusing on performance, value density, and developer experience across metrics, traces, and logs, organizations realize benefits that are just as important:

• 50% faster troubleshooting, as developers spend less time wrestling with noisy queries, missing traces, or irrelevant logs
• Performant queries at scale, ensuring metrics are not just available but very responsive
• Dynamic tracing during incidents, with critical flows captured when they matter most and baselines restored with ease
• Cleaner log data, with patterns and growth trends highlighted so issues can be diagnosed faster without wading through irrelevant entries
• Quotas for budget predictability, enabling platform teams to prevent overages while giving developers autonomy to direct capacity toward the signals that deliver the most value

The message is simple: cost savings are real, but they’re just the beginning. Control pays dividends in performance, developer experience, and operational agility, across metrics, traces, and logs. By giving teams visibility into usage and cost together, it empowers them to trade away low-value signals for higher-value ones. This ensures budgets go toward the telemetry that matters most.

Cost savings are important, but they’re only one part of the story. True control in observability is about making every signal count, ensuring that metrics, traces, and logs are performant, valuable, and aligned to developer and business outcomes.

With Chronosphere’s Control Plane, organizations reduce data volumes and costs, but they also achieve faster incident response, optimized queries, clearer signals, and that scale with confidence and keep teams productive.

Control isn’t about cutting for the sake of saving. It’s about building a system that’s lean, reliable, and trusted by the people who depend on it most.

Q1: Isn’t control mainly about cutting costs?
A: Cost is important, but real control is about maximizing value density — making sure every retained signal is useful for performance, reliability, and developer productivity.

Q2: How does Metrics Control help developers day to day?
A: Rollups and aggregations keep queries performant, quotas prevent budget overages and keep costs predictable, and the Usage Analyzer highlights which metrics and labels deliver the most value. Developers spend less time wrestling with slow queries and more time solving problems.

Q3: How does Trace Control adapt during incidents?
A: With Datasets and Behaviors, teams can instantly increase sampling on critical flows (like Checkout) to capture the right traces, then restore baseline policies afterward — no redeploys required.

Q4: Can I apply control across metrics, traces, and logs?
A: Yes. Chronosphere’s Control Plane applies consistent principles of control — cost, performance, and value density — across all signals.

Q5: What results have customers achieved?
A: On average, Chronosphere customers see an 84% reduction in data volumes and costs along with 50% faster troubleshooting.