SREcon24 Europe/Middle East/Africa

Joan O'Callaghan, Udemy


Monitoring-as-a-Service products, like Datadog and Honeycomb are amazing products for implementing monitoring & observability with minimal effort, but like Anything-as-a-Service, it comes at a cost.

We are a very normal company, with all the tech debt and orphaned code that any company over a certain age has. Like everyone else, we had staff that heard, "measure everything!" but they didn't know what the monitoring bill looked like and that "everything" included a lot of junk.

In the talk I'll discuss how we managed to reduce cost wastage, enable extra vendor features, improve M&O knowledge within the engineering organisation and keep the bill the same or lower, despite a 60% growth in infrastructure at our company.

Notes re the vendor - I won't say who the Vendor is, but I think our experience was universal enough that our fixes and techniques will be helpful to other companies.


https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon24emea/presentation/ocallaghan