DevOps&SRE Library

Who the Hell is Going to Pay For This?

I’ve specialized in monitoring and observability for 27 years now, and I’ve seen a lot of tools and techniques come and go (RMon, anyone?); and more than a few come and stay (Rumors of the death of SNMP have been – and continue to be – greatly exaggerated.). Lately I’ve been exploring one of the more recent improvements in the space – OpenTelemetry (which I’m abbreviating to “OTel” for the remainder of this blog). I wrote about my decision to dive into OTel recently.

For the most part, I’m enjoying the journey. But there’s a problem that has existed with observability for a while now, and it’s something OTel is not helping. The title of this post hints at the issue, but I want to be more explicit. Let’s start with some comparison shopping.

Before I piss off every vendor in town, I want to be clear that these are broad, rough, high level numbers. I’ve linked to the pricing pages if you want to check the details, and I acknowledge what you see below isn’t necessarily indicative of the price you might actually pay after getting a quote on a real production environment.

https://www.adatosystems.com/2025/02/10/who-the-hell-is-going-to-pay-for-this

www.tgoop.com/devopslibrary/6502

3.09K viewsJun 21 at 15:04

Who the Hell is Going to Pay For This?

I’ve specialized in monitoring and observability for 27 years now, and I’ve seen a lot of tools and techniques come and go (RMon, anyone?); and more than a few come and stay (Rumors of the death of SNMP have been – and continue to be – greatly exaggerated.). Lately I’ve been exploring one of the more recent improvements in the space – OpenTelemetry (which I’m abbreviating to “OTel” for the remainder of this blog). I wrote about my decision to dive into OTel recently.

For the most part, I’m enjoying the journey. But there’s a problem that has existed with observability for a while now, and it’s something OTel is not helping. The title of this post hints at the issue, but I want to be more explicit. Let’s start with some comparison shopping.

Before I piss off every vendor in town, I want to be clear that these are broad, rough, high level numbers. I’ve linked to the pricing pages if you want to check the details, and I acknowledge what you see below isn’t necessarily indicative of the price you might actually pay after getting a quote on a real production environment.

BY DevOps&SRE Library