January 14, 2026
Logs that don’t spark joy
I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't
The Vector guy says monitoring bills are wild—fans cheer, ops cynics roll eyes
TLDR: Vector’s creator calls out the observability industry for selling pricey monitoring while ignoring how much data is waste. Comments split between applause for the truth bomb, fan requests for on‑prem options, and cynics saying the real issue is workplace politics and vendor incentives.
The creator of Vector—the open-source plumbing many teams use to move logs—just torched the “monitoring” business and asked the question vendors duck: how much of your data is pure waste? After a decade (and a stint at Datadog), he says the industry turned engineers into cost police, selling pricey dashboards while shrugging “it’s your data.” The comments lit up. OP binarylogic went full whistleblower; fans cheered, skeptics grabbed popcorn. One reader joked that AI for Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) can “root cause in minutes,” yet vendors can’t tell you what to throw away. The mood: cathartic rage at renewal hikes, side-eye at sales reps, and a loud call to stop paying for garbage.
Hot takes flew. matanyall admitted “having ‘good monitoring’ and then still not being able to figure out what broke,” which hit a nerve. peterldowns backed the thesis: “waste and unnecessary cost.” tot19 turned fanboy, saying Vector is daily rave material and asking if the new tool (“Teri”) will run on‑prem. Then stackskipton crashed the party: the real problem is politics, not tech—“another service… won’t solve it, but go get that bag.” Meme of the day: “Observability Marie Kondo”—does this log spark joy? If not, drop it. The crowd wants a data detox, honest pricing, and vendors who help teams stop burning cash.
Key Points
- •The author founded Timber.io in 2016, which evolved into Vector, gained mass adoption, was acquired, and the author stayed for three years.
- •The article argues that observability teams face escalating costs and limited vendor support, even when diligent in managing data volume.
- •An example renewal increase of 40% year-over-year is cited as part of rising costs, making vendor switching costly and disruptive.
- •A central question posed is how much observability data is waste, which vendors avoid answering despite its importance.
- •The author claims cost drives most observability innovation, citing pipelines, storage systems, and OpenTelemetry as cost-motivated.