Let’s be blunt: your observability stack is bloated, brittle, and bleeding money.
Telemetry, once a trickle of logs, is now a relentless flood. High-cardinality metrics, verbose and duplicated logs, and traces of varying usefulness are piling up. And yet, most teams still respond the same way: by building more plumbing.
Agents. Collectors. Pipelines. Custom processors stitched to vendor-specific configs. It’s brittle. It’s complex. And it’s misaligned with what teams actually need: clarity, control, and cost savings.
We’ve been here before. Big data turned lakes into swamps. Cloud turned scale into sprawl. And now, telemetry is collapsing under its own weight. Shipping data isn’t enough. We need to manage it intelligently.
From pipelines to purpose
But things are changing and quickly. After years of bloated observability bills and telemetry data sprawl that hampers visibility, a new intelligent layer has emerged to control cost and dramatically improve the quality of telemetry data.
Smart telemetry management is not another way to build pipelines. It’s a new way to think about the problem. Yes, it includes pipeline configuration, but the real magic is in the intelligence layer that sits on top. This layer doesn’t just move data; it understands it, shapes it, and acts on it.
For developers and security teams, this means less backend noise and more actionable insight. The intelligence layer flags waste, enforces structure, and drives decisions. No more guesswork. No more ticket queues. Just real-time feedback and control.
For DevOps, the operational load drops. Ownership shifts to the people generating telemetry, without sacrificing consistency or cost control. This handoff is powered by the Telemetry Data Portal, the developer-facing interface where the intelligence becomes tangible.
It’s not just a pipeline or a dashboard, it's a full-blown control plane that abstracts low-level configs so teams can focus on what they want to achieve, not how to route packets.
Plug it in once. From there, platform teams shape the data. Developers and security teams tune and trust what’s emitted, without YAML or custom scripts.
It turns the firehose into a faucet.
Cost is the canary
And as we know, observability bills are out of control. DevOps gets the invoices. Developers generate the data. But neither side has the tools, or visibility, to rein it in. Until recently, there wasn’t an easy way to get a handle on the problem. We were at the mercy of our observability vendor. Teams often lack the time and resources to invest in making a move to a more affordable solution. Worse yet, if they do make the move, they’re still plagued by the same problems they experienced at their previous provider - out-of-control telemetry data. Today, smart telemetry management is tackling the cost problem head-on and making it a shared concern by:
- Setting per-team or per-service limits
- Surfacing cost drivers directly to the engineers who are emitting the data
- Taking action in one click—no pipeline spelunking required
This isn’t about blame. It’s about visibility, autonomy, and control.
Beyond cost: the ripple effect
Once you tackle cost, everything else gets easier:
Simpler root cause analysis. Clean, enriched, consistent telemetry = better signals. Kill redundant logs. Throttle noisy metrics. Enforce structure upstream. MTTR drops.
Security & compliance hygiene. Redact sensitive fields. Route data by classification. Enforce retention policies by team or region. Governance becomes proactive.
Intelligence, not infrastructure
We’ve already seen this shift elsewhere:
- Storage got governance
- Compute got orchestration
- Infrastructure got automation
Now it’s telemetry’s turn.
The best teams aren’t building more pipelines. They’re managing the flow. With purpose. With context. With cost control built in.
Sawmills was built for this
Sawmills is the first platform designed for smart telemetry management:
- An intelligent telemetry engine built on OpenTelemetry
- AI-powered analysis to detect waste and improve quality
- A telemetry portal that gives all teams actionable insights and the ability to take that action with 1 click
Before your telemetry ever hits Datadog, Splunk, New Relic, or Loki, or any other observability solution, Sawmills makes it cheaper, cleaner, and more usable.
Cut your spend. Improve RCA. Eliminate chaos. That’s smart telemetry.
