New Report Shows Observability Costs Rising Faster Than Value as Data Growth Forces Enterprise Teams Into Painful Trade-Offs

Research conducted by Imply finds observability platform spending is up, satisfaction down, and a growing demand for alternative options built for scale.

Imply, the company behind Lumi, the modern data layer for observability, today released The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders report. The new research is based on a survey of senior observability and platform leaders at large enterprises, examining how data growth, retention limits, and cost pressures are reshaping observability strategies. The findings show a widening gap between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures.

Top Findings

• 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.”

Introducing Imply Lumi: A Modern Observability Data Layer Built for Compatibility, Scale and Fast Queries

The report points to a growing need for a new architecture model—one that breaks the link between data volume and cost, supports full-fidelity retention, and enables fast queries across complete datasets without requiring workflow changes.

Imply Lumi is a modern observability data layer that introduces a new “observability warehouse” approach to storing and querying high-volume log and event data. Imply Lumi complements and extends existing observability platforms by providing a cost-efficient backend that reduces an organization’s data footprint, accelerates search, and supports full-fidelity retention at petabyte scale.

Because teams cannot afford disruption, Imply Lumi works with the tools enterprises already use. It extends Splunk, integrates with pipelines like Cribl and OpenTelemetry, and connects to Grafana, Tableau, and AI assistants such as Anthropic’s Claude and LangChain. This approach gives organizations a way to scale observability without replatforming.

Access the Full Report

Download the full-length version of The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders report from Imply here.

About Imply

Imply is the company behind Lumi, the modern data layer for Observability, Security, and AI. Imply Lumi is an observability warehouse that helps organizations to keep more data, search it faster, and spend less, without changing their existing tools. Founded by the original creators of Apache Druid®, Imply delivers cloud-native infrastructure trusted by leading enterprises worldwide. Backed by a16z, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Thoma Bravo, Imply is headquartered in Silicon Valley with operations across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Learn more at Imply.io.

© 2022 Imply. All rights reserved. Imply and the Imply logo, are trademarks of Imply Data, Inc. in the USA. Apache Druid is a registered trademark of the Apache Software Foundation in the USA.

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