Embracing Cost-Effective Observability Through an OpenTelemetry Approach

Mimi Shalash
Splunk

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage.

OpenTelemetry helps organizations understand the performance and health of their cloud-native applications and the infrastructure that supports them. As an open-source, vendor-neutral framework, it delivers the full toolkit to telegraph an organization's telemetry. With APIs, SDKs (software development kits) and a robust set of tools, OpenTelemetry helps teams tune in to the signals their systems are sending. Because when it comes to observability, it actually pays to keep your data well instrumented.

And the data proves it. Recent research shows that 57% of observability leaders have successfully reduced costs with OpenTelemetry by gaining control over what telemetry is collected, how it's routed, and where it goes.

Putting Organizations in Control of Their Valuable Data

Internal data is the engine driving digital transformation. Organizations rely on it to understand system behavior, optimize performance and make informed decisions. But as data volumes grow, so do costs.

OpenTelemetry gives organizations control over their telemetry strategy, enabling them to define where data is sent, what it includes, how it's structured, and how much is collected. This flexibility allows teams to implement intelligent data management policies, prioritizing high value telemetry for real-time analysis while routing lower priority data to cost effective archival storage. For example, critical data such as payment transactions can be sent to object storage for audit compliance, while simultaneously being forwarded to an APM tool for monitoring. It's a strategic shift: decoupling data collection from backend lock in and routing based on performance, compliance or cost requirements.

Boosting Efficiency with People and Process

Beyond cost savings, OpenTelemetry reduces organizational friction. While most developers agree on the need for observability standards, consensus often breaks down when teams push for their preferred tools.

OpenTelemetry solves this problem. It's the pragmatic standard that teams across stacks and languages can align around. It acts as a great equalizer, bringing consistency to data collection, while giving teams the flexibility to route telemetry to multiple backends based on evolving needs. And best of all, it avoids forcing immediate tool consolidation, which is often political, slow, and resource heavy.

Log it if you must … but it's the truth.

Giving Organizations Freedom and Reducing Vendor Lock-in

OpenTelemetry's value doesn't stop at efficiency. It's also about freedom. With OpenTelemetry, organizations can now challenge vendors to differentiate on how they analyze and visualize telemetry, rather than locking value behind proprietary data collection methods. What's the alternative? Getting stuck in tool jail where switching platforms feels like rewriting your entire application … with your wallet.

Proprietary tools might check the box today, but relying on vendor managed agents long term is a liability and creates technical debt. Here's why: out of the box telemetry rarely delivers the context required for intelligent automation. To enable smarter alerting, routing or remediation, teams need to enrich telemetry with custom tags and context. The more tightly you couple that enrichment to a proprietary agent, the more painful it becomes to migrate when pricing changes or architectural needs evolve.

OpenTelemetry has flipped the script by forcing vendors to compete where it matters; the quality of their insights, analytics and user experience.

Empowering Your Business with Observability

While many organizations recognize the business benefits of observability, turning that vision into reality takes more than good intentions. It takes the right skills, clear ownership and cross functional alignment.

Despite being the second largest project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry can still feel overwhelming, especially for those just starting out. But here's the good news; the most successful observability practices don't wait for the perfect hire. They grow their own. They invest in curious, motivated team members and empower them to become OpenTelemetry champions from within. Look for developers and engineers who are excited about improving visibility, then give them the space and support to dive in, whether that's reading the OpenTelemetry docs, exploring CNCF resources, or joining community forums where they can learn from peers and industry experts.

Observability isn't just a tool, it's a mindset. And when teams future proof their instrumentation, they don't just collect data, they unlock answers.

Drive Performance and Save Costs with OpenTelemetry

Remember, with OpenTelemetry, your data stays portable, your tooling stays flexible, and your observability strategy stays future proof. In a world full of noise, only the teams who own their telemetry will trace their way to uptime.

Mimi Shalash is Observability Advisor at Splunk, a Cisco company

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Embracing Cost-Effective Observability Through an OpenTelemetry Approach

Mimi Shalash
Splunk

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage.

OpenTelemetry helps organizations understand the performance and health of their cloud-native applications and the infrastructure that supports them. As an open-source, vendor-neutral framework, it delivers the full toolkit to telegraph an organization's telemetry. With APIs, SDKs (software development kits) and a robust set of tools, OpenTelemetry helps teams tune in to the signals their systems are sending. Because when it comes to observability, it actually pays to keep your data well instrumented.

And the data proves it. Recent research shows that 57% of observability leaders have successfully reduced costs with OpenTelemetry by gaining control over what telemetry is collected, how it's routed, and where it goes.

Putting Organizations in Control of Their Valuable Data

Internal data is the engine driving digital transformation. Organizations rely on it to understand system behavior, optimize performance and make informed decisions. But as data volumes grow, so do costs.

OpenTelemetry gives organizations control over their telemetry strategy, enabling them to define where data is sent, what it includes, how it's structured, and how much is collected. This flexibility allows teams to implement intelligent data management policies, prioritizing high value telemetry for real-time analysis while routing lower priority data to cost effective archival storage. For example, critical data such as payment transactions can be sent to object storage for audit compliance, while simultaneously being forwarded to an APM tool for monitoring. It's a strategic shift: decoupling data collection from backend lock in and routing based on performance, compliance or cost requirements.

Boosting Efficiency with People and Process

Beyond cost savings, OpenTelemetry reduces organizational friction. While most developers agree on the need for observability standards, consensus often breaks down when teams push for their preferred tools.

OpenTelemetry solves this problem. It's the pragmatic standard that teams across stacks and languages can align around. It acts as a great equalizer, bringing consistency to data collection, while giving teams the flexibility to route telemetry to multiple backends based on evolving needs. And best of all, it avoids forcing immediate tool consolidation, which is often political, slow, and resource heavy.

Log it if you must … but it's the truth.

Giving Organizations Freedom and Reducing Vendor Lock-in

OpenTelemetry's value doesn't stop at efficiency. It's also about freedom. With OpenTelemetry, organizations can now challenge vendors to differentiate on how they analyze and visualize telemetry, rather than locking value behind proprietary data collection methods. What's the alternative? Getting stuck in tool jail where switching platforms feels like rewriting your entire application … with your wallet.

Proprietary tools might check the box today, but relying on vendor managed agents long term is a liability and creates technical debt. Here's why: out of the box telemetry rarely delivers the context required for intelligent automation. To enable smarter alerting, routing or remediation, teams need to enrich telemetry with custom tags and context. The more tightly you couple that enrichment to a proprietary agent, the more painful it becomes to migrate when pricing changes or architectural needs evolve.

OpenTelemetry has flipped the script by forcing vendors to compete where it matters; the quality of their insights, analytics and user experience.

Empowering Your Business with Observability

While many organizations recognize the business benefits of observability, turning that vision into reality takes more than good intentions. It takes the right skills, clear ownership and cross functional alignment.

Despite being the second largest project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), OpenTelemetry can still feel overwhelming, especially for those just starting out. But here's the good news; the most successful observability practices don't wait for the perfect hire. They grow their own. They invest in curious, motivated team members and empower them to become OpenTelemetry champions from within. Look for developers and engineers who are excited about improving visibility, then give them the space and support to dive in, whether that's reading the OpenTelemetry docs, exploring CNCF resources, or joining community forums where they can learn from peers and industry experts.

Observability isn't just a tool, it's a mindset. And when teams future proof their instrumentation, they don't just collect data, they unlock answers.

Drive Performance and Save Costs with OpenTelemetry

Remember, with OpenTelemetry, your data stays portable, your tooling stays flexible, and your observability strategy stays future proof. In a world full of noise, only the teams who own their telemetry will trace their way to uptime.

Mimi Shalash is Observability Advisor at Splunk, a Cisco company

Related Links

Hot Topics

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I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

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Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

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For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

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For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

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Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

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