Observability Maturity Assessment
Free Observability Maturity Audit (Datadog, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, SLOs)
A senior-SRE-verified assessment of your MELT data (Metrics, Events, Logs, Traces), instrumentation, alerting, SLO programme, on-call health, and observability spend. Benchmarked against Google SRE's Four Golden Signals, the RED and USE methods, OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, and OpenSLO - across Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, Grafana LGTM, Splunk, Elastic, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, and Google Cloud Operations.
- Covers Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, Chronosphere, Splunk, AppDynamics, Sumo Logic, Elastic, Grafana LGTM (Loki, Tempo, Mimir), CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Operations, and OpenTelemetry
- Benchmarked against Google SRE's Four Golden Signals, RED, USE, OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, and OpenSLO - plus eBPF auto-instrumentation (Pixie, Coroot, Beyla, Odigos) and profiling (Parca, Pyroscope)
- Senior SRE verifies every finding - typical first audit cuts alert noise 30-50%, observability spend 20-40%, and surfaces 5-15 critical service-to-service blind spots
- Read-only access only
- No telemetry data leaves your environment
- Senior SRE-verified
- Live findings walkthrough included
Supported Platforms
What We Audit Across Your Observability Stack
Six areas - metrics, logs, traces, alerts, SLOs, and spend - benchmarked against Google SRE's Four Golden Signals, the RED and USE methods, OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, and the OpenSLO specification.
Metrics Coverage (Four Golden Signals, RED, USE)
Assesses Four Golden Signals (Latency, Traffic, Errors, Saturation), RED (Rate, Errors, Duration), and USE (Utilisation, Saturation, Errors) coverage across every service and dependency. Reviews cardinality control, recording rules, histogram quality (Prometheus native histograms, OpenMetrics), and OpenTelemetry semantic conventions adoption.
Logging Quality, Cost & Retention
Evaluates structured logging (JSON, OpenTelemetry log data model), levels, trace and request correlation IDs, PII / secrets in logs, retention vs query patterns, and log volume by service. Identifies redundant logs that should be metrics and tier-routing opportunities (hot / warm / cold) across Datadog, Splunk, Sumo Logic, Elastic, Loki, and CloudWatch Logs.
Distributed Tracing & OpenTelemetry / eBPF Coverage
Checks trace coverage across service boundaries, head vs tail sampling, W3C Trace Context propagation, trace-to-log and trace-to-metric correlation, and OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline health. Reviews eBPF auto-instrumentation (Cilium Hubble, Pixie, Coroot, Grafana Beyla, Odigos) and continuous profiling (Parca, Pyroscope, Datadog Profiler).
Alert Quality, Signal-to-Noise & On-Call Health
Analyses alert signal-to-noise ratio, missing critical alerts, duplicate and flapping alerts, alert ownership, runbook coverage per alert, MTTA / MTTR distributions, on-call load distribution, and integration with PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Incident.io, FireHydrant, Rootly, or Blameless. Returns a cleanup backlog typically shrinking page volume 30-50%.
SLO Programme, Error Budgets & Burn-Rate Alerting
Evaluates SLO and SLI definition quality, multi-window multi-burn-rate alerting (Google SRE Workbook), error-budget policy, customer-facing availability commitments, and tooling adoption (Sloth, Pyrra, Nobl9, OpenSLO, Datadog SLOs, Grafana SLO, Honeycomb SLOs). Maps every user journey to the SLO it should have - and the ones that should not.
Observability Cost & Vendor Strategy
Quantifies your observability bill by source (custom metrics, log ingestion, indexed logs, APM hosts, span-based metrics) and identifies waste - high-cardinality metrics, debug logs in production, unsampled traces, redundant agents. Includes OpenTelemetry / Grafana LGTM open-source migration analysis and Datadog / New Relic / Splunk repricing strategies - typically 20-40% off.
How It Works
Register & Grant Read-Only Access
Provide read-only access to your observability platform (Datadog read-only API key, Grafana viewer role, New Relic read-only user, Honeycomb read-only key, AWS / Azure / GCP read-only IAM) plus exports of dashboards, alert configs, SLO definitions, and 30 days of billing data. No telemetry is copied off your environment.
Automated Maturity Scan & Cost Analysis
We programmatically inventory dashboards, alerts, monitors, SLOs, and instrumentation; profile alert signal-to-noise from 30 days of incident and pager data; map service-to-service coverage; and analyse 30-90 days of billing telemetry to quantify ingestion vs retention vs custom-metric waste.
Senior SRE Verification & Maturity Scoring
A senior SRE who has run on-call for high-traffic SaaS reviews every finding, removes false positives, models blast radius for your team, scores each pillar Reactive → Proactive → Optimising, and rewrites recommendations into a prioritised ticket-ready backlog with quantified MTTA / MTTR and $/month impact.
Receive Report & Live Debrief
Get your Observability Maturity Score per pillar, alert-cleanup backlog, OpenTelemetry / eBPF instrumentation roadmap, SLO programme plan, and observability cost-savings backlog with quantified $/month - within 1-2 business days, plus a 45-minute live walkthrough.
What You Get
Your report will include the following deliverables.
Cut alert noise. Cut your observability bill. Find blind spots before customers do.
Get a senior-SRE-verified maturity report with alert cleanup backlog, OpenTelemetry roadmap, SLO programme plan, and quantified $/month cost-savings - read-only access, no telemetry exfiltrated, completely free.
Get My Observability Maturity ReportHow We Handle Your Telemetry & Configuration
An observability audit must never leak the very data that lets you operate. Here is exactly what we read - and what never leaves your environment.
Read-Only Viewer Access, Time-Limited
We use a read-only API key (Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic, Dynatrace), viewer role (Grafana, Splunk Observability), or read-only IAM (CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Operations) scoped strictly to dashboards, alerts, SLOs, monitors, and billing APIs - time-limited to the audit window. We can never modify dashboards, silence or create alerts, change SLOs, or alter retention policy.
No Telemetry Data Exfiltrated
The audit reads configuration metadata, alert definitions, dashboard JSON, SLO and monitor specs, and aggregate volume / billing telemetry only. We never copy log lines, span payloads, metric series with PII labels, or trace bodies off your platform. Any sample data needed for cardinality or quality analysis is read in-place via the platform's query API and never exported.
Auto-Revoked & Destroyed After Audit
As soon as your maturity report is delivered, every API key and IAM credential is revoked, the analysis sandbox is destroyed, and your dashboard / alert / billing exports are deleted. Only aggregate, anonymised findings are retained for QA - never service names, dashboard IDs, account IDs, or billing identifiers.
Frequently Asked Questions
The most common questions we hear from teams running this assessment.
What access do you actually need? Will any of our telemetry leave our environment?
No telemetry data leaves your environment. We use a read-only API key (Datadog, Honeycomb, New Relic, Dynatrace, Grafana Cloud) or viewer role / read-only IAM (Grafana, Splunk Observability, CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Operations) scoped strictly to dashboards, alerts, monitors, SLOs, and billing APIs. We read configuration metadata, alert definitions, dashboard JSON, and aggregate volume / billing data only - never log lines, span payloads, or metric series with PII labels. We provide the exact scopes in advance for your security team to review.
Which observability platforms do you actually support?
All major commercial and open-source platforms: Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Honeycomb, ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly Lightstep), Chronosphere, Splunk Observability / SignalFx, AppDynamics, Sumo Logic, Logz.io, Elastic Observability, Grafana Cloud and self-hosted Grafana LGTM (Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Grafana), AWS CloudWatch and X-Ray, Azure Monitor and Application Insights, Google Cloud Operations, OpenTelemetry Collector pipelines, and self-hosted Jaeger and Zipkin. The audit also covers continuous profiling (Parca, Pyroscope, Datadog Profiler) and eBPF auto-instrumentation (Cilium Hubble, Pixie, Coroot, Grafana Beyla, Odigos).
Can the audit help us cut our Datadog / New Relic / Splunk bill?
Yes - this is one of the most commonly requested deliverables. We analyse 30-90 days of billing telemetry to quantify spend by source (custom metrics, log ingestion, indexed logs, APM hosts, span-based metrics, ingestion vs retention) and produce a backlog of concrete cost-cuts with quantified $/month: high-cardinality custom metric reduction, debug-logs-as-metrics conversion, head-vs-tail sampling tuning, retention tier-routing, redundant agent removal, and where it makes sense an OpenTelemetry / Grafana LGTM open-source migration plan or Datadog / New Relic / Splunk repricing strategy. Typical reductions are 20-40%.
How do you measure alert quality and on-call health?
We pull 30-90 days of alert / incident / pager history (with PII redacted) from PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Incident.io, FireHydrant, Rootly, Blameless, Grafana OnCall, or Datadog On-Call, then compute signal-to-noise per alert, MTTA and MTTR distributions, alert ownership, runbook coverage, on-call load distribution per engineer, and identify duplicate, flapping, and chronically-acked alerts. The output is a concrete cleanup backlog typically reducing page volume by 30-50% within a few sprints.
Do you help us adopt OpenTelemetry and replace vendor agents?
Yes. The audit includes an OpenTelemetry adoption roadmap covering language SDK auto-instrumentation, semantic conventions compliance, OpenTelemetry Collector pipeline architecture (gateway vs agent, processors, exporters), W3C Trace Context propagation, and parallel-run / cutover strategy from vendor agents (Datadog APM, New Relic, Dynatrace) to OpenTelemetry. For teams that want zero-code coverage we also evaluate eBPF auto-instrumentation - Cilium Hubble, Pixie, Coroot, Grafana Beyla, Odigos - against your runtime (Kubernetes, Linux nodes) and language mix.
Can you help us build a real SLO programme?
Yes. We map every customer-facing user journey to the SLO it should have, recommend SLI definitions (availability, latency, quality, freshness), design multi-window multi-burn-rate alerts per the Google SRE Workbook, draft an error-budget policy, and recommend tooling (Sloth, Pyrra, Nobl9, OpenSLO, Datadog SLOs, Grafana SLO, Honeycomb SLOs) based on your stack. The output also identifies which SLOs you should not have - vanity SLOs, internal-only services that do not need them - so the programme stays sustainable.
Will the audit affect production or trigger alarms?
No. The audit is fully read-only. API queries run at controlled rates against viewer-scoped credentials; we never silence alerts, modify dashboards, or change retention. Where your SIEM might flag the read activity we can pre-coordinate with your detection team, but in practice the calls look identical to a normal SRE running queries.
How long until we receive the report?
Typical turnaround is 1-2 business days from the moment read-only access is granted, plus a 45-minute live findings walkthrough at a time that suits your SRE, platform, and engineering leads. Larger estates with hundreds of services across multiple platforms can take a little longer; we confirm the timeline as soon as we see the scope.
Register for Your Free Observability Maturity Assessment
Fill out the form below and our team will get back to you within 2 business days.
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