Carousel · Terraform & Infra · Oct 11, 2026
Your logs are eating your budget
In short
Observability bills keep climbing, and the easy fix is to cut retention. Then the 3 AM page comes and the evidence is gone. Five ways to cut the bill without going blind: sample the noise, tier your retention, count with metrics instead of logs, tail-sample your traces, and watch label cardinality.
Checklist: what to do about it
- Sample the noise: sample debug and info logs at the source, and keep 100% of errors.
- Tier your retention: hot for 7 days, warm for 30, then a cheap archive.
- Count with metrics, not logs: emit a metric and log only the exceptions.
- Tail-sample your traces: keep slow and failed traces, sample the rest.
- Watch label cardinality: bounded labels only. IDs go in traces, not metric labels.
- Set a log-budget alert per service so the bill can't creep back.