Engineering Team Cuts Datadog Costs From $38K to $15K With Data Hygiene Fixes

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A software engineering team reduced their Datadog monitoring bill by 60%, bringing monthly costs down from $38,000 to $15,000 after leadership demanded significant cuts. The team eliminated 1,800 unused custom metrics out of 2,400, retaining only those actively referenced in dashboards or alerts, which alone saved 30%. They also restructured log storage into tiered retention, removed high-cardinality user-level tags from metrics, and stopped running synthetic monitors on development environments. APM sampling was adjusted to 10% for healthy traces while maintaining full 100% capture for errors and slow requests, cutting APM volume by 85%. The team concluded that high observability costs typically stem from poor data hygiene rather than vendor pricing issues.

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ProgrammingDEV Community ·

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