Business dimension

Sooner or later, every leadership team asks what observability brings in, and why the bill is growing faster than the traffic. The business dimension answers with figures, cost models and explicit trade-offs, without repeating vendor talk.

Published and upcoming chapters

Chapter	What you learn to do	Status
What a business or product owner can ask of observability	ask the engineering team the right questions, phrase an SLO, take your place in incidents	published
The Collector is the cost lever	cut the bill at the source: cardinality, sampling, routing	in review
Understanding pricing models	compare per-host, per-volume, per-series and per-user billing	planned; reading a bill line by line is covered in the CIO path, lesson 4
Building the business case	put a figure on incident cost, MTTR and avoided loss	published in the CIO path, lesson 1; for AI, the GenAI method, part V
Sovereignty and architecture choices	trade off SaaS, self-managed open source and trusted cloud	planned; the selection method is in the CIO path, lesson 3
Buying without lock-in	negotiate reversibility, data portability and exit	the clauses to ask for are in the CIO path, lesson 4; dedicated chapter planned
Running a telemetry budget	set up FinOps tracking of signals per team	published in the CIO path, lesson 4

A rule for this dimension

Figures are either sourced or explicitly presented as illustrative scenarios. When I have no source, I give an order of magnitude rather than a precise percentage.

The bridge to engineering

A finance director has no use for a CPU curve. This dimension translates technical signals into unit cost, avoided loss and risk, in the terms used in an executive committee. See Bridges.

Putting figures on it

Tool	Question it answers
Cost is decided at the Collector	how much each lever saves, before and after
MTTR business case	what faster detection is worth
Cardinality explosion	why the bill jumps orders of magnitude
GenAI economic exposure	what a blind spot costs on an AI service
Solution scorecard	which option to pick, with the same criteria for all