Datadog is a powerful observability platform. However, whether it's also a cost-effective observability platform depends largely on how efficiently you manage the data that flows through Datadog. If you're looking to manage your Datadog costs without compromising on the visibility that Datadog provides into your environments, streamlining your approach to processing data within Datadog is essential.

Telemetry pipelines offer a simple means of doing that. In multiple ways, telemetry pipelines help to control Datadog costs without sacrificing the effectiveness of Datadog as an observability solution.

Let’s walk through three potential cost challenges related to data within Datadog and discussing how telemetry pipelines solve them.

Data Ingestion Costs

Like many observability platforms, Datadog charges for data ingested. In most cases, you'll pay $0.10 per gigabyte of data that you import into Datadog in order to perform application performance monitoring and observability.

There's no getting around the data ingestion costs for data you need to analyze. The reason why data ingestion can bloat your Datadog spend, however, is that in some cases, businesses import data that they don't end up analyzing. For example, they might import an entire log file when only parts of it are useful for observability purposes. Alternatively, they might ingest duplicate data. Situations like these mean you end up paying unnecessary data ingestion costs.

Telemetry pipelines help avoid such costs by making it possible to filter out data that doesn't need to be analyzed before it reaches Datadog. You can also perform trimming, sampling, deduplication, or similar operations within your telemetry pipeline in order to reduce the total size of your data before it's ingested. The end result is a lower volume of data ingestion, which translates to lower costs.

Data Retention Costs

Datadog lets you define retention policies that determine how long data stays within the Datadog platform. Keeping data inside Datadog means you can review it or run new analyses on it instantly whenever you want.

However, storing data long-term inside Datadog also increases your costs because the longer you store data, the more you pay.

Telemetry pipelines help on this front by providing a way to route data to an alternative, lower-cost storage location, like object storage or a data lake. You can always "rehydrate" the data back into Datadog if you need, but you won't be stuck paying high data retention costs just to keep the data available.

Limited Data Value

Datadog is a useful platform, but your use cases may go beyond what the platform can support. 

As a result, the amount of value that Datadog allows teams to derive from their data is limited. You can enhance the cost-effectiveness of your overall observability operation if you enable data access to wider range of teams, for different needs. This also means that you can leverage multiple tools for analysis or visualization based on your business needs.

With a telemetry pipeline, leveraging multiple tools becomes easier. Telemetry pipelines make it easy to route some data to Datadog while routing other data to alternative platforms that might provide better searching or alerting features for certain cases, or that cost less to produce the same type of analysis as Datadog for certain types of data.

Put simply, telemetry pipelines give you more freedom to pick and choose between multiple observability tools in order to build an observability stack that delivers maximum value at minimum cost.

High Observability Without High Costs

Observability can be costly, especially if you are limiting yourself to a single tool and have little flexibility in areas like data ingestion and retention.

With a telemetry pipeline, you free yourself from these restrictions. Telemetry pipelines place you – not your observability platform – in control of how data is routed and processed, resulting in a lower total cost than you could achieve in most cases by ingesting all of your data directly into a tool like Datadog and retaining it there as long as you need to keep it available.

If you want to streamline your Datadog spending, you need to be in control of how your observability data is managed. The best way to do that is to take advantage of telemetry pipelines. 

At Mezmo, our telemetry pipeline solution puts you in control of how your data is routed and processed, resulting in a lower total cost compared to ingesting all of your data directly into a tool like Datadog and retaining it there indefinitely. By leveraging Mezmo’s Telemetry Pipeline, you can optimize your Datadog spending and gain better control over your data.

‍Visit our telemetry pipeline page today to learn more about how our solution can help you achieve high observability at a lower cost.