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"We cut our costs in half and actually increased our observability coverage in testing environments. We now have full coverage where we previously had to limit it due to cost concerns."
About Nobl9
Nobl9 is a service level objective (SLO) platform that helps organizations track and optimize their reliability goals by integrating with various observability tools. Designed for cloud-native environments, Nobl9 runs its platform across multiple cloud providers - AWS (EKS) and Google Cloud (GKE) - while leveraging PostgreSQL (RDS & Cloud SQL), Kafka, and Flink.
As a company that builds an observability-focused product, Nobl9 maintains deep integrations with major monitoring platforms. However, as its production environment scaled, so did its observability costs, forcing the team to reevaluate its approach.
In the company’s very early days, they went for Datadog thinking it was a safe choice, but as the company grew, costs soared - especially for custom metrics and log retention. This led Nobl9 to seek a cost-effective alternative that would provide full-stack observability without sacrificing developer experience or monitoring depth.
“The migration from Datadog to groundcover was smooth, developers barely noticed the change, which is the best outcome you can ask for.”
- Alex Nauda, CTO, Nobl9
The Problem: Soaring observability costs inhibiting growth
Nobl9 was facing significant challenges, mostly due to the rising costs of their APM platform, which became disproportionately expensive. They were relying on:
- Datadog for APM
- Amazon Managed Prometheus for metrics
- AWS CloudWatch and GCP’s Logging for log management
Budget-related issues, primarily caused by a continuously growing Datadog bill, forced the team to restrict their visibility. Alex and his team tuned down the amount of data retained and limited the scale of their monitoring coverage. They were facing:
- Spiraling observability costs: As Nobl9’s workloads expanded, observability costs grew disproportionately. The “Datadog tax” - the additional percentage paid on top of core infrastructure costs - reached 15-20% of total cloud spend. The team aimed to cut this to 10% or lower.
- Limited coverage in non-production environments: Due to Datadog’s pricing structure, Nobl9 had to disable observability in certain dev/test environments to reduce costs. This lack of visibility made debugging more difficult and slowed development velocity.
- Inability to scale metrics & logs, as it became too expensive: Custom metrics usage increased as the company built out its SLO calculation engine, but storing and querying those metrics within Datadog proved cost-prohibitive. Even moving metrics to Amazon Managed Prometheus (AMP) only reduced costs by 40%, leaving metrics as a major expense.
- Migration complexity & risk: Observability transitions can be painful, requiring significant retooling. Nobl9 needed an alternative that could integrate seamlessly, minimizing migration friction.
Why groundcover?
As the Nobl9 team evaluated alternatives, groundcover stood out for three key reasons:
- Effortless eBPF-based observability: One of the biggest advantages of groundcover was its eBPF-powered auto-instrumentation. Unlike traditional monitoring tools that require manual instrumentation, eBPF enables instant monitoring with zero code changes. By simply deploying a Helm chart in Kubernetes, Alex’s team was able to capture logs, traces, and metrics instantly, without modifying their services.
- Cost efficiency: Bring Your Own Compute (BYOC): Unlike Datadog, which charges based on data ingestion and storage, groundcover’s self-hosted model gave Nobl9 full control over costs. By leveraging ClickHouse for logs and VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Nobl9 drastically reduced its monitoring bill while retaining full observability capabilities.
- Full control over data & storage: For a company handling large volumes of customer SLO data, data retention control is critical. Unlike managed SaaS observability platforms, groundcover allows flexible retention policies, enabling Nobl9 to store logs and metrics efficiently without excessive costs.
“We didn’t have to re-instrument our services. groundcover’s eBPF auto-instrumentation was like nothing else we had seen before - drop it in and immediately get deep observability.”
- Alex Nauda, CTO, Nobl9
The Impact
- 50% reduction in observability costs: By replacing Datadog and Amazon Managed Prometheus with groundcover, Nobl9 cut its monitoring costs in half while improving coverage. The observability tax on infrastructure dropped well below 10%, surpassing the team’s target cost-efficiency goal.
- Expanded observability coverage: Previously, Datadog’s pricing forced Nobl9 to turn off observability in test environments. With groundcover, full coverage was restored across dev, test, and staging environments, improving debugging and developer experience.
- Seamless migration in under 2 months: Despite concerns about migration complexity, the transition to groundcover was completed in just two months. Most workloads were migrated within the first month, with minimal disruption to development teams.
- Improved debugging with deeper insights: eBPF-based tracing unlocked new troubleshooting capabilities that were not available in Datadog. Developers could now inspect full request payloads, providing more granular debugging insights.
“With Datadog, we were paying for both infrastructure and observability, effectively doubling costs. With groundcover, we host it ourselves and define our own retention policies - no more expensive SaaS markups, unexpected overages, or forced data deletions due to cost limits.”
- Alex Nauda, CTO, Nobl9
Looking Ahead: Scaling with groundcover
With full cost control, Nobl9 is confident that observability costs will scale linearly with its infrastructure, rather than growing disproportionately.
While groundcover provides native tracing and metrics, Nobl9 plans to gradually expand OpenTelemetry usage where needed. groundcover’s OTel support ensures seamless integration, allowing teams to adopt best-of-breed observability at their own pace.
By switching to groundcover, Nobl9 drastically reduced costs, expanded observability, and gained more control over data retention and scaling. What started as a cost-cutting initiative ultimately resulted in a superior observability experience, without compromise.
“With groundcover, we get better observability at half the cost. We now have a sustainable, predictable observability cost model that scales with our business.”
- Alex Nauda, CTO, Nobl9
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