Ongoing Stewardship
Continuous observability guidance without a full-time hire. Join your on-call reviews, tune SLOs, and maintain what we built together. Start with a free discovery call.
You’ve Built Something Good. Now Keep It That Way.
Your observability stack is running. Your team is trained. The initial implementation worked. But observability doesn’t stay fixed as organizations grow.
New services launch. Traffic patterns shift. Alert thresholds drift. SLOs need tuning. The team that built it moves on. Knowledge erodes.
Most teams solve this by hiring a dedicated observability engineer. But finding the right person takes 6+ months, costs $200K+ annually, and locks you into years of commitment before you know if it’s working.
I work differently. Ongoing stewardship gives you consistent access to strategic thinking without a full-time hire. You get a steady hand on observability without starting a new engagement every time a question comes up.
Start With a Free Discovery Call
Let’s talk about where you are, what you need ongoing support with, and whether a retainer makes sense. No pitch, no pressure.
What Stewardship Includes
Ongoing advisory work for teams that want continued guidance after implementation. I join your weekly rhythms and help maintain momentum.
Core Activities
Weekly On-Call Reviews
- Join your on-call review meetings to help reduce time to resolution
- Identify patterns in incidents and alert noise
- Help the team learn from incidents, not just resolve them
SLO Tuning and Maintenance
- Continue tuning SLOs as traffic patterns and business priorities shift
- Ensure SLOs remain connected to customer experience, not arbitrary thresholds
- Adjust error budgets and burn rate alerts as the system evolves
- Help teams use SLOs for decision-making, not just reporting
On-Call Performance Measurement
- Measure on-call performance using stats from PagerDuty or similar platforms
- Track time to acknowledge, time to resolution, alert frequency
- Work with you to set goals and measure progress
- Identify team health issues before they become burnout problems
Retrospective Participation
- Participate in incident retrospectives and post-mortems
- Help extract systemic learnings from individual incidents
- Guide teams toward process improvements that stick
- Build knowledge that compounds across the organization
Ongoing Guidance for Custom Work
- Maintain any custom observability work we built together
- Provide guidance as architecture evolves or new tools are added
- Help with migrations, upgrades, or platform changes
- Ensure your team continues to own the stack, not depend on me
Strategic Thinking Without a New Engagement
- Answer questions as they come up without formal scoping
- Provide guidance on vendor evaluations or tool decisions
- Help with cost optimization as usage patterns change
- Be available for async questions and regular check-ins
This Is for Teams Who Want a Steady Hand
You’ve invested in building internal capability. You don’t want to outsource observability. But you also don’t want to lose momentum or let things drift.
Stewardship gives you consistent access to strategic thinking without the commitment of a full-time hire.
You get someone who already knows your stack, understands your business context, and has built trust with your team. No onboarding lag. No risk that they leave after 18 months. Just steady, reliable guidance.
This isn’t about creating dependency. It’s about maintaining what we built together while your team continues to own and evolve the stack.
How It Works
- Free discovery call to understand your current state and ongoing needs
- Scope the retainer based on your priorities (on-call reviews, SLO tuning, performance measurement)
- Regular check-ins (weekly on-call reviews, monthly strategic sessions, async access)
- Continuous guidance without starting a new engagement every time
- Your team continues to own it while I provide strategic support
Retainer engagements are typically month-to-month with no long-term commitment required.
Who This Is For
Ideal if you:
- Have an IT, Software Engineering, DevOps, or SRE organization (50-1,500 employees)
- Completed an observability implementation and want to maintain momentum
- Need ongoing SLO tuning, on-call improvement, or performance measurement
- Want strategic guidance without a full-time hire
- Prefer month-to-month flexibility over long-term personnel commitments
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:
- We scope a retainer (weekly reviews, SLO tuning, performance measurement)
- Not a priority right now (fine, maybe we work together later)
- You’re all set (great, you have what you need)
No pressure. Just clarity.
Book Your Free Discovery Call
Let’s talk about your ongoing needs and see if a retainer makes sense.
FAQ
Q: Do I need to have worked with you before to start a retainer? A: Typically yes. Stewardship works best when I already understand your stack and business context from a previous engagement. But if you have a clear need and we align, we can make it work.
Q: What’s the time commitment on your side? A: Depends on your needs. Typical retainers include weekly on-call reviews (1 hour), monthly strategic sessions (1-2 hours), and async access for questions. We’ll scope it during the discovery call.
Q: Is this a long-term contract? A: No. Retainers are month-to-month with no long-term commitment required. Either party can adjust scope or end the engagement with 30 days notice.
Q: What if we need more hands-on work during the retainer? A: We can adjust. If a major project comes up (migration, new platform, etc.), we can scope that separately or fold it into the retainer if it makes sense.
Q: Do you work with our on-call rotation or just advise? A: Just advise. I join your on-call reviews to help reduce MTTR and identify noisy alerts, but I don’t carry a pager or join your on-call rotation directly.
Q: What if our needs change month-to-month? A: That’s fine. We adjust based on what’s happening. Some months need more focus on SLO tuning, others on retrospectives or performance measurement. The retainer flexes to match your priorities.