How Much Observability Is Enough for Microservices?

A team spent 65 minutes debugging a midnight outage across 7 services, only to find the root cause was a 500 error from inventory-service. With distributed tracing, they could have identified the issue in 2 minutes. The article breaks down the costs of observability: Datadog for 20 services costs ~$2,500/month, while self-hosted Grafana runs ~$250/month plus engineering time.