The Observability Vendor Subscription Model

The site is down. Customers are complaining. Your on-call engineer is in hour three of spelunking through dashboards that look like a Jackson Pollock painting. You’re paying six+ figures annually for an observability platform, and the most useful alert so far has been “Something is wrong. Probably.”

The observability vendors charge by the byte. They want you to send everything. The industry tells you to measure everything. So you instrument everything, send it all to your vendor, and wait for clarity.

Instead, you get an Observability bill that’s higher than your AWS or GCP compute costs. And you still can’t answer basic questions: Is my application healthy? Are customers experiencing problems right now? Should I be paging someone?

Even with a top-tier vendor and unlimited budget, more data doesn’t equal more clarity. You’re drowning in metrics, dashboards, and alerts — but you still don’t know what actually matters.

Learn how to reduce alert fatigue and build strategic SLOs by combining multiple KPIs into a single weighted health score. A practical approach to measuring service reliability.