How We Cut Datadog Bills by 60% Without Losing Observability

Short summary

A DevOps team reduced their $38k/month Datadog bill to $15k through targeted optimization: eliminated 1,800 unused custom metrics, implemented tiered log retention, reduced tag cardinality, dropped dev synthetic monitors, and applied selective APM sampling (10% on healthy traces, 100% on errors). The core insight: observability bills reflect data collection patterns, not vendor pricing.

• •Cut Datadog costs by 60% ($38k to $15k) through data optimization, not negotiation
• •Key strategies: eliminate unused metrics, tier log retention, reduce tag cardinality, selective sampling
• •Core lesson: observability budgets are data hygiene problems, not pricing problems

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