Why are telemetry costs growing so fast?
The short answer is that digital business runs on machine data, and machine data does not stop growing. As organizations rely more on digital services, the telemetry generated by infrastructure, applications, and security tooling has expanded. It supports availability and performance monitoring, security analytics, and threat hunting. It has also become a rising cost center.
With data volumes climbing nearly 30% annually per IDC, and AI workloads increasing data volume, many teams find themselves locked in a cycle of expanding storage, scaling ingest pipelines, and paying higher licensing fees just to keep up. The stakes are high: ITIC's 2024 research found that 97% of large enterprises say a single hour of downtime now tops $100,000, and IBM's Cost of a Data Breach Report put the global average breach at $4.44 million in 2025. You cannot afford blind spots, but you also cannot afford to keep everything in premium tools forever.
What happens when telemetry costs go unchecked?
The consequences reach well beyond the monthly bill. When budgets are strained, ITOps and SecOps teams make tradeoffs. They reduce log retention, limiting the ability to investigate historical outages or breaches. They filter out useful data, which slows root cause analysis and causes missed detections. They delay adopting new tools, stalling modernization and automation efforts. And they bury engineers in administrative work that crowds out real process improvement and makes on-call life worse.
Siloed toolsets and fragmented pipelines add inefficiency. For ITOps, that means more incidents and higher mean time to repair. For SecOps, it means slower threat detection, gaps in compliance coverage, and longer incident response times. Either way, the business pays.
Why can't legacy architectures keep up?
Many observability and security tools were not designed for today's scale. Rigid, vendor-locked architectures produce brittle systems that are ineffective, expensive, and hard to replace.
In ITOps, engineers miss data that is critical to resolving incidents. In SecOps, analysts are slowed by manual data parsing instead of hunting threats. Teams spend more time managing data than acting on it. Your data should serve your teams, not the other way around.
How do smarter pipelines change the equation?
With a telemetry pipeline, data becomes manageable and predictable. Teams send the right data to the right tools based on how they plan to use it. Cribl Copilot automates pipeline setup, reducing manual work and shortening time to value.
For ITOps, this means faster troubleshooting, more stable systems, and better capacity planning. For SecOps, it means more complete coverage, faster detection, and stronger compliance. Instead of reacting to surprise bills and bloated logs, you shape your data strategy and tiering approach to fit your budget and business goals.
How Cribl can help with telemetry cost control
Cribl is an AI platform for telemetry, built to break this cycle for both operational and security data. Rather than bolting onto existing silos, Cribl's vendor-agnostic platform is a central hub that reduces data volume and complexity, cuts costs, and supports compliance, all without adding agents or disrupting existing systems. Here's how the pieces fit together:
Cribl Stream: Filter, sample, redact, enrich, and route telemetry before it reaches high-cost destinations, cutting volumes by 50% or more without losing critical visibility.
Cribl Lake: Store just-in-case data in low-cost object storage while keeping it instantly searchable, with no rehydration delays.
Cribl Search: Query data wherever it lives for compliance lookbacks, threat investigations, and deep root cause analysis.
By rightsizing data for each tool, you extend both your SIEM and observability budgets without losing insight. Because Cribl keeps your data portable, interoperable, and searchable at AI scale, you avoid lock-in that turns today's cost problem into tomorrow's migration challenge. You decide what to collect, how to process it, and where to send it.
Ready to address your telemetry time bomb? Download The telemetry time bomb white paper for the full picture, explore the Cost Control Initiative to see how teams are reclaiming budget, or read the solution guide on reducing telemetry expenses with Cribl for in-depth strategies, customer stories, and key capabilities. You can also process up to 1 TB per day free with a Cribl.Cloud account.
How fast is telemetry data growing?
Industry analysts at IDC estimate telemetry growth at about 29% per year. At that rate, data volumes double roughly every 18 months. The surge in AI workloads may increase that rate.
Why do rising telemetry costs hurt security and operations?
When budgets are squeezed, teams cut log retention, filter out useful data, and delay adopting new tools. For ITOps, that means longer outages and higher MTTR. For SecOps, it means missed detections, compliance gaps, and slower incident response.
Can I reduce telemetry volume without losing visibility?
You can. A telemetry pipeline such as Cribl Stream filters, samples, redacts, enriches, and routes data before it reaches high-cost destinations. This can cut volumes by 50% or more while keeping a full-fidelity copy in low-cost storage for later use.
What should I do with data I might need later?
Store it in low-cost object storage with Cribl Lake. It remains instantly searchable, with no rehydration delays and without paying premium ingest rates for data you rarely access.
How does data tiering help control telemetry costs?
Data tiering sends critical, high-access data to analytics tools and routes lower-priority data to affordable storage. This extends your SIEM and observability budgets while preserving insight and compliance coverage.
How do I get started with Cribl?
You can process up to 1 TB per day for free with a Cribl.Cloud account, or try a guided Sandbox before rolling anything into production.
