Cardinality Audit
Get an Observability Roadmap that cuts costs, identifies gaps, and connects telemetry to business outcomes. Start with a free discovery call.
You’re Caught Between Cost Pressure and Team Trust
Your CFO is asking why observability costs are growing faster than revenue. Your engineers believe any reduction means flying blind. You can’t predict next quarter’s bill, can’t explain the current one, and risk losing your team’s trust if you cut without a plan.
The problem isn’t the bill. The problem is you don’t know what you’re paying for or whether it’s connected to actual business outcomes.
The Vendor Incentive Problem
Your observability vendors are incentivized to maximize data volume. More metrics, more logs, more traces means more revenue.
Their default configurations collect everything. Their generic dashboards and alerting patterns rarely fit your actual business logic. Their professional services teams will happily help you instrument everything and increase retention while your costs spiral.
I’m different. As an independent observability architect, I’m incentivized when my clients cut costs and make better decisions with their data. That fundamental alignment changes everything.
Start With a Free Discovery Call
Let’s talk about your goals, your stack, and your constraints. No pitch, no pressure. Just a conversation to see if an audit makes sense for you.
Get Your Observability Roadmap
If we decide to move forward, you’ll get a written Observability Roadmap that gives you confidence to make decisions.
What the Roadmap Includes
Current State Mapping
- Where your money is going
- What telemetry you’re collecting vs. what you’re actually using
- How your alerts map to actual incidents (signal vs. noise)
Signal and Alert Gaps
- What you’re missing about customer health and experience
- Where you’re blind to production problems
- Alerting patterns that don’t fit your business logic
Cost-to-Insight Misalignment
- High-cardinality metrics burning $30K/month that nobody looks at
- Retention policies storing months of debug logs nobody searches
- Duplicate data sent to multiple tools “because we haven’t consolidated yet”
- Over-provisioned infrastructure to avoid crashes (but poorly tuned)
High-Leverage Optimization Options
- Specific opportunities to improve ROI (typically 3-5 major options)
- Clear decision thresholds: when to optimize, when to migrate, when to build
- Tradeoffs explained: not tooling preferences, but business decisions
You keep this roadmap whether or not we continue working together.
How It Works
- Free discovery call to understand your goals and constraints
- You grant read-only access to your observability platform + rough spend numbers
- I conduct independent analysis (may reach out with follow-up questions)
- Results call to walk through your roadmap and discuss next steps
Investment
Who This Is For
Ideal if you:
- Have an IT, Software Engineering, DevOps, or SRE organization (50-1,500 employees)
- Spend $50K-$1M+/year on observability
- Use Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or similar
- Can make cost optimization decisions (VP Eng, CTO, Director SRE)
- Face unpredictable costs, alert fatigue, or unclear ROI
Who I Am
Jack Neely – Independent Observability Architect, Cardinality Cloud
- 25 years in systems architecture and SRE
- Led observability teams at Palo Alto Networks and Fitbit
- Saved $2.5M annually migrating away from Splunk
- Implemented Thanos at enterprise scale for Prometheus clustering (8M+ samples/sec, 150TiB logs/day, 300+ engineers)
- Open source contributor (Graphite, Prometheus, Thanos, StatsRelay)
- Compliance expertise: HIPAA, GDPR, FedRAMP
- Host: Cardinality Cloud YouTube channel
I’m a practitioner who’s built observability systems that don’t break and don’t break the bank.
What Happens After?
Three outcomes:
- You implement yourself (great, clarity worth 5 figures for $497)
- Not a priority right now (fine, maybe we work together later)
- Want implementation help (we discuss Architecture Redesign or Ongoing Stewardship)
No pressure. Just clarity.
Book Your Free Discovery Call
Let’s talk about your observability challenges and see if an audit makes sense.
FAQ
Q: What’s the difference between the discovery call and the audit? A: The discovery call is free. We talk about your goals, stack, and constraints to see if an audit makes sense. If we decide to proceed, the $497 audit includes independent analysis and a written Observability Roadmap.
Q: What’s included in the $497? A: Independent analysis of your observability platform and a written Observability Roadmap that maps your current state, identifies gaps, highlights cost misalignment, and lays out optimization options with clear decision thresholds.
Q: What access do you need? A: Read-only access to your observability stack and rough spend numbers. I may ask follow-up questions during analysis.
Q: How long until results? A: Usually 3-5 business days between discovery call and results presentation.
Q: What if my spend is under $50K/year? A: Still valuable! The roadmap builds a forward-looking observability architecture that bakes cost efficiency into your growth plans.
Q: What if you can’t find significant opportunities? A: I’ll tell you honestly. If you’re already optimized, I’ll document what you’re doing well. I don’t manufacture problems.