Grafana: Why observability needs FinOps, and vice versa

On my last job, the company was using NewRelic (for two environments we was using at the time) which had an ok cost and "suddenly" we'd been forced to use Datadog which costs way over for our budget and after the person responsible for the change and integration see the estimated high costs, started to cut everything possible to keep it low. So, our tools degraded and we wasn't able to test things on staging and collect metrics like we was when using NewRelic. FinOps is certainly a good approach, but we need it from the start!

One of the advantages of self-hosting is that you don't need this level of FinOps. You also don't have to live in fear of bill-mageddon.

So next time someone says "in cloud you don't need anyone to manage it for you" you can link them this article.

You know you have a problem when you're afraid to add a few more metrics because the bill might get too high.

I am big fan of &quot;cost monitoring&quot;.<p>In my previous company I had a good setup for costs monitoring - including release to release comparisons, drill downs, statistics, etc.<p>After each release I looked at this data. It saved a lot of $, by simple fixes like &quot;why we are calling this API twice?&quot;.<p>It also quite some issues that weren&#x27;t strictly customer related, but weren&#x27;t apparent from other type of data (you will always have some &quot;unknown unknowns&quot; in your monitoring, and costs data seem to be pretty wide net to catch some of those)

I&#x27;m a fan of Grafana, both the main tool and also the infrastructure projects they have been working on, they did a great service to the IT world. However, the pricing of their cloud service, that&#x27;s some shady business. It goes from reasonable pricing to oh-my-god pricing so fast. I really wish they would introduce limits on their paid plans, but that&#x27;s against their business practice.

Seriously? Not everything needs to be xxxOps. And if you need a &quot;FinOps&quot; team to manage your cloud cost, I would argue that there&#x27;s something wrong with your whole damn paradigm.

What&#x27;s Grafana? I see it mentioned here a lot, nowhere else though. Is it a YC property?