What It Takes to Run Monitoring and Observability

What Each One Actually Costs

Most content comparing monitoring and observability stays at the definitional level: three pillars, metrics versus traces, known and unknown unknowns. This session skips that and looks at the operational side instead.

Kris Buytaert, DevOps and Open Source Expert, and Blerim Sheqa, COO at Icinga, walk through what it actually takes to run each approach. Not which one is better, but what each one demands: how long it takes to get the first useful data, what can and cannot be covered, where the configuration lives and who owns it, and how much engineering time goes into keeping it working month after month.

A second thread runs through the whole session: what changes with scale. A 50-host environment and a 5,000-host enterprise environment have different requirements, and the answer that is right for one is often wrong for the other.

This webinar takes place on October 27, 2026 at 15:00 CET.

In this session, we cover:

• What it takes to get data flowing. Agent rollout and check definitions on one side, collector deployment and application instrumentation on the other
• Coverage limits: switches, storage appliances, VMware, UPS and PDUs, and applications nobody can recompile
• Configuration management: where the config lives, who owns it, who reviews changes, and how that holds up as the environment grows
• The recurring time cost in engineering hours: check tuning and threshold drift versus cardinality management, sampling policy and cost control
• Small versus enterprise: which requirements only appear at scale, including audit retention, budget predictability, separation of duties and data sovereignty
• Why enterprises keep running both, and where the boundary between them usually sits
• Interactive Q&A session

Whether you run monitoring today and are wondering what an observability stack would demand from your team, or you already run both and are trying to draw a sensible line between them, this session gives you the operational picture rather than the marketing one.