I agree with the framing. The goal isn't less data for its own sake. The goal is understanding your systems and being able to debug when things break.
But here's the thing: most teams aren't drowning in data because they're being thorough. They're drowning because no one knows what's valuable and what's not. Health checks firing every second aren't helping anyone debug anything. Debug logs left in production aren't insurance, they're noise.
The question isn't "can you do with less?" It's "do you even know what you have?" Most teams don't. They keep everything just in case, not because they made a deliberate choice, but because they can't answer the question.
Once you can answer it, you can make real tradeoffs. Keep the stuff that matters for debugging. Cut the stuff that doesn't.
Agree to an extent. There are absolutely unknown unknowns. But I think you'd be surprised how much data is obviously waste. Not the grey area, just pure garbage: health checks, debug logs left in production, redundant attributes.
But we don't stop there. You can go deeper with reasoning to root out the more nuanced waste. It's hard, but it's possible. That's where things get interesting.
Thank you! And you're right, it shouldn't cost that much. Financials are public for many of these vendors: 80%+ margins. The cost to value ratio has gotten way out of whack.
But even if storage were free, there's still a signal problem. Junk has a cost beyond the bill: infrastructure works harder, pipelines work harder, network egress adds up. And then there's noise. Engineers are inundated with it, which makes it harder to debug, understand their systems, and iterate on production. And if engineers struggle with noise and data quality, so does AI.
It's all related. Cheap storage is part of the solution, but understanding has to come first.
What you're describing is very real and it works to a degree. I've seen this same manual maintenance play out over and over for 10 years: cleaning dashboards, chasing engineers to align on schemas, running cost exercises. It never gets better, only worse.
It's nuts to me that after a decade of "innovation," observability still feels like a tax on engineers. Still a huge distraction. Still requires all this tedious maintenance. And I genuinely think it's rooted in vendor misalignment. The whole industry is incentivized to create more, not give you signal with less.
The post focuses on waste, but the other side of the coin is quality. Removing waste is part of that, but so is aligning on schemas, adhering to standards, catching mistakes before they ship. When data quality is high and stays high automatically, everything you're describing goes away.
You'd be shocked how much obviously-safe waste (redundant attributes, health checks, debug logs left in production) accounts for before you even get to the nuanced stuff.
But think about this: if you had a service that was too expensive and you wanted to optimize the data, who would you ask? Probably the engineer who wrote the code, added the instrumentation, or whoever understands the service best. There's reasoning going on in their mind: failure scenarios, critical observability points, where the service sits in the dependency graph, what actually helps debug a 3am incident.
That reasoning can be captured. That's what I'm most excited about with Tero. Waste is just the most fundamental way to prove it. Each time someone tells us what's waste or not, the understanding gets stronger. Over time, Tero uses that same understanding to help engineers root cause, understand their systems, and more.
The question is answered in the post: ~40% on average, sometimes higher. That's a real number from real customer data.
But I'm an engineer at heart. I wanted this post to shed light on a real problem I've seen over a decade in this space that is causing a lot of pain; not write a product walkthrough. But the solution is very much real. There's deep, hard engineering going on: building semantic understanding of telemetry, classifying waste into verifiable categories, processing it at the edge. It's not simple, and I hope that comes through in the docs.
To loosely describe our approach: it's intentionally transparent. We start with obvious categories (health checks, debug logs, redundant attributes) that you can inspect and verify. No black box.
But underneath, Tero builds a semantic understanding of your data. Each category represents a progression in reasoning, from "this is obviously waste" to "this doesn't help anyone debug anything." You start simple, verify everything, and go deeper at your own pace.
Yeah, it's funny, I never went down the regex rabbit hole until this, but I was blown away by Hyperscan/Vectorscan. It truly changes the game. Traditional wisdom tells you regex is slow.
> I'm surprised it's only 40%.
Oh, it's worse. I'm being conservative in the post. That number represents "pure" waste without sampling. You can see how we classify it: https://docs.usetero.com/data-quality/logs/malformed-data. If you get comfortable with sampling the right way (entire transactions, not individual logs), that number gets a lot bigger. The beauty of categories is you can incrementally root out waste in a way you're comfortable with.
> compare logs from known good to known bad
I think you're describing anomaly detection. Diffing normal vs abnormal states to surface what's different. That's useful for incident investigation, but it's a different problem than waste identification. Waste isn't about good vs bad, it's about value: does this data help anyone debug anything, ever? A health check log isn't anomalous, it's just not worth keeping.
You're right that the dimensional analysis and pre-processing is where the real work is. That's exactly what Tero does. It compresses logs into semantic events, understands patterns, and maps meaning before any evaluation happens.
100% accurate. It is very much political. I'd also add that the problem is perpetuated by a disconnection between engineers who produce the data and those who are responsible for paying for it. This is somewhat intentional and exploited by vendors.
Tero doesn't just tell you how much is waste. It breaks down exactly what's wrong, attributes it to each service, and makes it possible for teams to finally own their data quality (and cost).
One thing I'm hoping catches on: now that we can put a number on waste, it can become an SLO, just like any other metric teams are responsible for. Data quality becomes something that heals itself.
Thank you for the nice comment. I'm glad you enjoy Vector. I poured myself into that software for many years. I'm a bit bummed with its current trajectory, though. We hope to bring the next evolution with Tero. There were many problems with Vector that I wished I could have fixed but was unable to. I hope to do those things with Tero (more to come!)
And yes, Tero is fundamentally a control plane that hooks into your data plane (whatever that is for you: OTel Collector, Datadog Agent, Vector, etc). It can run on-prem, use your own approved AI, completely within your network, and completely private.
Hey Peter, I absolutely remember you! Thanks for the nice comment.
And yes, data waste in this space is absurdly bad. I don't think people realize how bad it actually is. I estimate ~40% of the data (being conservative) is waste. But now we know - and knowing is half the battle :)
But here's the thing: most teams aren't drowning in data because they're being thorough. They're drowning because no one knows what's valuable and what's not. Health checks firing every second aren't helping anyone debug anything. Debug logs left in production aren't insurance, they're noise.
The question isn't "can you do with less?" It's "do you even know what you have?" Most teams don't. They keep everything just in case, not because they made a deliberate choice, but because they can't answer the question.
Once you can answer it, you can make real tradeoffs. Keep the stuff that matters for debugging. Cut the stuff that doesn't.