Dynatrace, a leading observability vendor, has recently announced its response to enterprise cost concerns by introducing a bulk data pricing tier and new data ingestion methods into its platform. The move comes as a response to the growing concerns over the management of observability data amidst macroeconomic worries in the tech industry.

The increasing amount of observability data being collected by enterprises to keep up with distributed applications and AI has led to a corresponding rise in the cost of managing that data. This has prompted IT professionals to reconsider their approaches, from streamlining the number of vendors they work with to reducing the amount of data ingested into back-end systems. At the same time, there is a need for increased data observability sophistication as advanced analytics and generative AI usage expand.

Nancy Gohring, an analyst at IDC, highlighted the current trend of vendors changing their pricing models in response to companies collecting more telemetry data and realizing the potential for escalating observability costs. She noted that vendors are under pressure to cut costs wherever possible, leading to the introduction of new pricing models and plans.

Following suit with competitors like New Relic and Splunk, Dynatrace has adjusted its pricing to accommodate data growth. It has introduced a pricing tier for its OneAgent data collector called Foundation & Discovery, offering basic monitoring with options for log management and application security for any size host at a price of $0.01 per hour. Additionally, users can utilize a new Discovery & Coverage app linked to Foundation & Discovery mode to automatically find and assess the criticality of unmonitored hosts.

Furthermore, Dynatrace has revealed plans to launch a data pipeline service over the next 90 days, known as OpenPipeline, which aims to shift some data processing away from its back-end platform. This move aligns with similar offerings from observability data pipeline vendors such as Cribl, CloudFabrix, Mezmo, and Calyptia (now owned by Chronosphere), all of which seek to reduce data transfer, ingestion, and storage costs by processing more data at the source.