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Observability cost model

Model telemetry spend before the bill arrives.

Enter known usage or estimate from infrastructure. The sliders use real-world gaps, so a team with ten hosts and an enterprise platform with thousands can use the same form without losing precision.

Current lowest SaaS estimate

$400/mo, Grafana Cloud
1.0B samples
metrics/mo
750 GB
logs/mo
30 days
retention

Usage inputs

Drag the range or type exact values. Slider spacing is logarithmic where observability usage naturally jumps across orders of magnitude.

33M samples/day. Count billable metric samples, not active series.

750 GB stored for the selected retention period.

60 GB stored for the selected retention period.

Hosts affect Datadog infrastructure and APM style pricing.

Full-access users affect New Relic and Grafana Cloud pricing. Basic dashboard viewers are often free or cheaper.

Estimate from infrastructure

Use this when finance has infrastructure counts, but not telemetry volumes. The estimator keeps the assumptions visible before applying them.

Bare metal nodes, cloud instances, and Kubernetes worker nodes.

From one startup cluster to fleet-wide regional platform clusters.

Primary databases, replicas, queues, and managed data services.

Instrumented services, workers, jobs, and public APIs.

Average production traffic. Spikes should be modeled by raising this toward peak load.

Metrics2.3B samples/mo
Logs40 GB/day
Traces14.2 GB/day
Hosts25

SaaS pricing comparison

SigNoz Cloud

Estimate
$424/mo
$5,088/year
  • $49 minimum includes usage credit
  • Metrics: $0.10/M samples
  • Logs and traces: $0.30/GB ingested

Grafana Cloud

Estimate
$400/mo
$4,800/year
  • $19 platform fee
  • 10K billable series included, then $6.50/1K
  • Logs and traces: 50GB each included, then $0.50/GB
  • 3 active users included, then $8/user

New Relic

Estimate
$690/mo
$8,280/year
  • 100GB/month ingest included
  • $0.40/GB after included ingest
  • Standard edition: first full user $10, then $99/user

Datadog

Estimate
$1,262/mo
$15,144/year
  • Infrastructure Pro: $15/host on annual list pricing
  • APM Pro: $31/host on annual list pricing
  • Log ingest: $0.10/GB ingested
  • Log indexing: 20% of logs at $1.70/M events

Cost by retention period

Retention makes the storage curve visible. This table holds volume constant and changes only days kept.

RetentionSigNozGrafanaNew RelicDatadogLGTM baseline
30 days$424$400$690$1,262$868
60 days$505$471$690$1,262$875
90 days$586$542$690$1,262$883
180 days$748$755$690$1,262$911

Turn the model into an operating plan.

CloudRaft designs and operates open-source observability platforms for teams that need cost control, retention policy, and production support without giving up Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Thanos, or VictoriaMetrics.

Get a custom quoteObservability consulting

Fixed spend envelope

Plan infrastructure and storage before usage scales.

Retention policy

Keep high-value signals longer without charging every team separately.

Data ownership

Run telemetry inside your cloud account and security boundary.

Platform support

Operate the stack with dashboards, alerts, upgrades, and SLOs.