Control Observability Costs
Applications running on containers and microservices generate anywhere from 10-100x more data than legacy VMs. Chronosphere is built to put you in control, so you can focus and pay for the data that matters.
We Power Observability for the Most Demanding, High-Volume Workloads
Modern cloud-native environments produce vast telemetry data, overwhelming most observability solutions and causing cost and scalability problems. The move to microservices has decentralized monitoring, giving individual service teams more control. However, these teams often ignore the financial consequences of their observability habits. This creates a gap between them and finance teams or FinOps specialists, who lack the detailed insight needed to attribute and optimize increasing observability costs. As a result, DevOps teams and financial stakeholders don't have a clear understanding of telemetry generation, consumption, and associated costs.
Challenges
Most observability tools struggle with cost control for several reasons:
Data Growth
Microservices environments emit a massive amount of data – somewhere between 10x and 100x more than traditional VM-based environments.
As organizations increase container adoption and start scaling their environments, their observability data volumes start to explode.
Lack of Accountability
Organizational complexity adds to the cost challenge.
More distributed teams are creating more dashboards, reports, and alerts, driving increases in metadata. Most observability solutions don’t give these teams insights into their usage. They also lack the ability to create guardrails on their consumption.
Unpredictability
Minor code changes can unintentionally impact observability data volumes and cardinality.
Most observability solutions don’t provide the insights needed to identify and manage these changes effectively – leading to unplanned overages and massive budget overruns.
How Chronosphere Helps Control Observability Costs
Chronosphere helps you identify and focus on the data that matters.
Instead of blindly storing all data, Chronosphere analyzes the volume and utility of your data as it arrives. See exactly how your data is being used – across dashboards, alerts, and queries – by whom and how often.
Then you can take action without touching code. Maintain full visibility for critical use cases, while eliminating waste and controlling costs.
Control Data Volume and Costs
More control means lower data volumes - and lower cost. Instead of being reactive to increased observability data growth, Chronosphere allows you to be proactive by giving you the tools and information you need to make data-driven decisions about your observability data.
On average, Chronosphere customers are able to reduce their observability data volumes by 84% at the start. This leads to significant cost savings while improving visibility and outcomes.
Set Limits and Give Teams Autonomy
Set consumption limits by team or service to prevent cost overages, while giving your engineering teams autonomy over their observability data.
Chronosphere enables you to establish guardrails through Quotas and allocation tracking. This prevents budget surprises and supports chargeback allocation.
At the same time, your engineering teams can set priority-based data handling rules for their services, ensuring they keep the visibility they need.
This creates the perfect balance: you maintain cost control and governance while your teams retain the flexibility to manage their own observability needs.
Pay for Value, Not Volume
Get predictable observability costs with complete transparency – no surprise bills or vendor lock-in.
Unlike other vendors who charge based on hosts, users, or raw data ingest, our pricing model lets you ingest all your observability data upfront. You can then understand its value and pay for the data that’s valuable.
The Control Plane gives you real-time visibility into data usage and costs, plus the power to shape your data based on actual need and utility.
Logs
Align Log Management Costs with Business Value
Understand which logs deliver value and which create waste, then optimize based on real usage patterns.
Get a Utility Score for every log pattern showing exactly how your team uses each type of log data. Track volume trends and growth patterns to anticipate cost impacts before they hit your budget.
Use these insights to act on automated recommendations – filter low-value logs and keep only the signal that matters for your critical use cases.
The result: pay for logs that drive decisions, not data that creates noise.
Metrics
Control Metrics Volume and Cost
Analyze your metrics usage, then optimize based on real insights.
See exactly which metrics drive costs and how they're being used across dashboards, alerts, and queries. Then take action with our data shaping capabilities – aggregate, downsample, or drop metrics that aren't delivering value.
The result: eliminate waste and reduce costs while maintaining the visibility your teams need.
Distributed Tracing
Optimize Trace Collection for Cost and Value
The Trace Control Plane provides centralized tools that enable you to focus on capturing only the most valuable trace data, reducing unnecessary costs.
Leverage Trace Datasets to organize traces by service flows, and simplify sampling management with Behaviors, eliminating the need for manual intervention.
Dynamic head and tail sampling allow you to set a low default sampling rate for cost control, then dynamically increase them during incidents for critical services—without requiring redeployment. This approach ensures critical visibility when it’s needed most, all while staying within budget.
Head Sampling
Dynamically adjust head sampling rates centrally - no need to redeploy.
Tail Sampling
Apply tail-based sampling rules to control costs.
85% Cost Reduction by Astronomer, with Chronosphere
Learn how Astronomer leverages Chronosphere’s Observability platform. With quick alerts to potential incidents they can rapidly find and fix the root cause of the problem before it impacts the customer’s experience.
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