🚨 Just published my first blog post — and it's about the number that stopped a leadership meeting cold.
We were a gaming company scaling fast. 100K concurrent players. Infrastructure costs climbing 15% month over month. And the biggest line item wasn't compute or databases — it was observability.
Datadog at 1TB/day: $40K/month. Projecting to 6TB/day: $120K/month.
So we built our own platform for $1,500/month instead.
In the post, I walk through:
→ How tagging AWS resources revealed waste we didn't know existed
→ Why we replaced Datadog + CloudWatch with a self-hosted LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir)
→ The surprising architectural change that cut cross-AZ transfer costs and improved reliability
→ What I'd do differently — and the question every engineering team should ask before signing a per-GB vendor contract
If your observability bill is growing with your data volume, you might want to read this before the curve catches up with you.

#AWS #Observability #CostOptimization #Grafana #Datadog #Kubernetes #Engineering naddr1qvzq...