For years, observability has promised to give teams the visibility they need to keep digital services resilient. But as data volumes explode, many leaders are realizing the tools they rely on aren’t keeping up.
Instead of delivering agility, today’s observability platforms are forcing painful trade-offs — between cost and coverage, speed and scale, insight and affordability.
That’s the story behind The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a new research report from Imply based on a survey of senior executives responsible for observability across large enterprises.
The results point to a clear conclusion: observability is reaching a breaking point.
Budgets are climbing, but confidence is falling.
One respondent put it bluntly:
“Splunk’s licensing model is a tax on growth. Every new use case just means higher spend.”
The pattern is clear. Organizations are investing more every year — but confidence is slipping. Instead of helping teams move faster, observability has become a source of friction, frustration, and financial strain.
In an ideal world, teams could retain and search all their observability data.
But for most leaders, cost pressure shows up in familiar ways — filtering logs, archiving to cold storage, or offloading data entirely.
In fact, nearly 80% admit they filter, archive, or offload logs just to stay within budget.
And 87% say slow queries caused by inaccessible data disrupt critical use cases like incident response and threat detection.
As one IT manager put it:
“We push more data to cold storage than we’d like, and we filter out logs that might be valuable later — just to keep costs in check.”
The result: investigations stall, blind spots appear, and resilience weakens.
In a field where every second counts, those trade-offs can spell the difference between detection and disruption.
Despite these frustrations, most leaders aren’t ready to rip and replace their observability stack. Familiar workflows matter. But the appetite for change is undeniable:
As one security leader explained:
“If something gave us the same search experience with better economics, we’d be all over it.”
Compatibility — not complexity — is what leaders want next.
The future of observability depends on breaking the cycle of rising costs and shrinking visibility.
Leaders can no longer afford to sacrifice retention, speed, or coverage just to manage their bills.
As data volumes continue to grow, the industry faces a defining question:
How do we scale observability without compromise?
Do we keep trimming data to fit the cost model?
Or do we rethink the architecture altogether?
The next phase of observability will be shaped by how leaders respond to these pressures today.
This blog only scratches the surface.
Download the full Breaking Point for Observability Leaders report to see all the data, including how executives are adapting, what trade-offs they’re making, and what they want most from their next generation of tools.
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Brittany Kaler