Put a Number on It: The ROI Calculator for Observability Strategy
Put a Number on It: The ROI Calculator for Observability Strategy
The Observability Vendor Subscription Model
The site is down. Customers are complaining. Your on-call engineer is in hour three of spelunking through dashboards that look like a Jackson Pollock painting. You’re paying six+ figures annually for an observability platform, and the most useful alert so far has been “Something is wrong. Probably.”
Sound familiar?
Eventually the incident ends. You schedule the retrospective. The observability vendor’s customer success manager joins the call (because of course they do — you’re spending enough for them to care). “How can we reduce MTTR?” you ask. The answer is always the same: “Send us more data. Turn on this new feature. Oh, and have you migrated to OpenTelemetry yet?”
Translation: Give us more money.
The Tax You Didn’t Vote For
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the only party consistently getting ROI from your observability platform is the vendor. They’ve turned monitoring into a subscription model where the meter never stops running.
But observability doesn’t have to be a tax. It should be an investment — one with measurable returns.
The CFO Question
“Can we quantify the ROI of fixing this?”
It’s a fair question. Hiring a “Senior Principal DevOps Observability Architect” (yes, that’s a real title I had) takes months and costs $200K+ annually. Maybe they’ll fix it. Maybe they’ll become part of the problem. It’s a gamble.
A focused observability strategy engagement costs a fraction of that senior hire, delivers results in weeks instead of months, and — here’s the kicker — teaches your existing team how to fish instead of just giving them one.
The SRE Math
Let’s talk signal-to-noise ratio. If your team is spending 40% of their time investigating false positives or hunting through metric spaghetti, that’s not just annoying — that’s budget waste.
Example scenario:
- 3 engineers @ $150K each = $450K annual cost
- 40% wasted on alert noise = $180K burned annually
- Cut that waste in half = $90K saved per year
Now add in the incident cost reduction. Every hour of downtime has a price tag — lost revenue, customer churn, engineer morale, and that dreaded all-hands email from the CEO.
What if you could reduce your MTTR from 3 hours to 1 hour? What if you could prevent 30% of incidents entirely by catching them at the SLO burn rate stage?
The math adds up fast.
The Long Game
Here’s what makes an observability strategy engagement different from throwing headcount at the problem:
Knowledge transfer is permanent. Your team learns why certain metrics matter and others don’t. They understand how to design SLOs that actually predict user pain. They can spot cardinality explosions before the observability bill does.
This isn’t a band-aid. It’s a skill tree unlock. Year after year, your team makes better decisions about what telemetry to collect, how to alert on it, and when to ignore the noise.
You’re not paying for ongoing senior-level employees who may or may not work out. You’re paying once for knowledge that compounds.
Show Me the Numbers
We built the Cardinality Cloud ROI Calculator because CFOs ask good questions and deserve real answers.
Plug in your numbers:
- Annual observability spend
- Annual observability cost increase (that lovely vendor inflation rate)
- Full-time senior SRE salary (what you’d pay to hire instead)
- Engagement duration
- Expected percentage reduction in observability spend
Get back: a real comparison of strategy engagement cost vs. the alternative paths forward.
No fluff. No “ROI is immeasurable because observability is priceless” nonsense. Just numbers.
The Bottom Line
If you’re an SRE: you already know this is broken. Now you have numbers to prove it to leadership.
If you’re a CFO: you already know something’s expensive. Now you can see if fixing it pencils out.
Either way, run the calculator. See if strategy beats the vendor subscription tax.