Engineering Team Cuts Log Management Costs 70% by Filtering Out Noise

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A software engineering team was spending $12,000 per month ingesting 2TB of logs daily, yet only about 5% of that data was ever consulted during incidents. To address this, they categorized log sources by value and set production systems to default at WARN level, switching to DEBUG only during active incidents. They also adopted tiered storage retention policies, dropping low-value entries like health check successes and debug traces entirely. Switching from unstructured to structured logging reduced parsing overhead, while request sampling kept only errors, slow responses, and a random 10% of successful calls. The result was a drop to 400GB of daily ingestion and a monthly bill of $3,600, with useful data rising from 5% to roughly 70%.

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