The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply.
Top findings of the report include:
- More than half of leaders allocate over 25% of their observability budget to a single platform, yet only 13% say they are very satisfied with the cost-to-value ratio.
- Nearly 80% of teams are filtering, archiving, or offloading logs to control costs—reducing critical data visibility when teams need it most.
- 87% of leaders report that slow queries on observability data were caused by inaccessible data delay workflows such as threat detection and incident response.
- 87% of respondents are exploring or open to platform alternatives that reduce cost and scale pressure without disrupting current workflows, and 98% say they would adopt a fully compatible option.
Observability Spending Is Increasing While Value Declines
Enterprise teams report rising observability costs year over year, but confidence in platform ROI is slipping. Leaders say platform-centric licensing models and the rapid growth of observability data have created an environment whereby retaining essential logs or adding new workloads often requires difficult trade-offs.
Rising Costs Are Forcing Cuts to Visibility
To manage spend, many organizations are reducing retention or shifting data into lower-cost storage tiers. These common cost-saving measures directly reduce visibility and degrade query performance, and come with significant operational consequences:
- High-value logs get filtered out before ingestion
- Investigations slow as teams move data out of cold storage
- Real-time responsiveness suffers during incidents
"Too many organizations are being priced into flying blind," said Eric Tschetter, Chief Architect at Imply. "They're cutting retention because budgets force their hand, and it shouldn’t be that way. Teams tell us they're pushing data into cold storage to keep costs in check and that can slow investigations, can create dangerous blind spots, and can weaken resilience. In a crisis, those trade-offs are unacceptable."
Teams Want Compatibility, Not Replatforming
Despite these challenges, leaders are not looking to rebuild their entire observability stack. Their frustration centers on the cost and scale limits of current approaches, not the workflows themselves.
- 98% of leaders would adopt a fully compatible option that eases cost and scale pressure
- Workflow continuity remains a top priority across respondents
"Teams aren't looking for a rip and replace," said Tschetter. "They want to keep their workflows and scale them. If you can separate cost from data volume and work with the tools they already trust, that's a breakthrough."