SaaS vs Self-Hosted Observability (Including BYOC): Cost, Latency, Control and Governance
Most teams don't choose an observability deployment model, they inherit one. Someone signed up for a SaaS trial three years ago, telemetry volume grew 40x, and now Finance is asking why the observability line item is the fourth-largest infrastructure cost on the P&L. Or the opposite: a self-hosted Prometheus and Elasticsearch stack was stood up when the company had twelve services, and now it needs a team of two just to keep it upright while everyone else waits on slow dashboards during incidents.