Software teams love to add logs to their code, and for good reason. High quality logs allow you to debug production code and gain insights on user behavior, without requiring new and elaborate tooling.
But it’s easy for logging to spin out of control, resulting in a dramatic increase in costs. Built-in cloud logging tools like Amazon CloudWatch, Azure Monitor Logs, and GCP Cloud Logging make this especially easy since a developer can add a simple console.log command to their code, later discovering that this data is being saved in perpetuity in their cloud environment. The result can be thousands and tens of thousands of dollars in unnecessary monthly spend that simply aren’t providing value to the business.
We see logging cost creep at most of the clients we work with. For example, an international public company was paying over $3,000 a month for logs that were simply translations being auto-generated and logged. The translation feature was important but the engineers at the company said that they never looked at these logs and didn’t need them. Nobody remembered why they were inserted in the first place.
These kinds of cases aren’t rare. In fact, most companies we work with discover a meaningful amount of logging cost creep, and the numbers can add up quite rapidly.
Sadly, it’s hard to understand the source of logging costs in the top 3 cloud environments. At Underspend we’ve built software that allows companies to get a granular view of their logging costs and their sources. So far this tool has helped companies save hundreds of thousands of dollars on an annualized basis, a figure which is rapidly growing. If you’re interested in learning more, reach out to us at logs@underspend.com.
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