Rethinking Observability Budgets in 2026: Optimizing for ROI

Observability as an Investment, Not a Cost Center

The way software teams handle observability budgets is changing. Forward-thinking engineering leaders see observability as a driver of growth rather than a cost center. Across the enterprise landscape, we’re seeing them optimize investments and find ways to spend smarter.

Join Charity Majors, CTO and Co-founder of Honeycomb, and James Governor, Analyst and Co-founder at RedMonk, for a data-driven conversation about what “good spend” actually looks like. They’ll dig into the two core value centers of observability (improved internal teams and happier external customers), reveal how to tie your spend directly to accelerated engineering performance and product value, and outline how to avoid losing your return on investment at scale.

What We'll Cover:

• Stop treating observability like overhead. Start treating it as an investment. Monitoring and logging were built as cost centers. Observability can change this. The payoff comes through faster, data-rich feedback loops, happier customers, and minimizing wasted effort.
• How to structure your stack for actual ROI. Handling high-value data at scale doesn't mean paying for everything. It means using a tiered strategy:
  • High-fidelity data for critical, customer-facing, or payment-handling systems.
  • Lightweight monitoring for background jobs and lower-priority services.
  • A smart data pipeline that sends high-volume, "spammy" data to cheap storage and that routes and samples data differently based on its criticality.
• Capturing details and dropping the duplicates. The future of observability is about structured, high-value telemetry that doesn’t skip the business context that makes a difference in production. We’ll show you how teams are moving from unstructured logs toward a model of one consistent, context-rich event per request. Teams that get this right see huge returns: faster analysis, clearer signals, and way less operational drag.
• The dual mandate of observability: outside and inside.
  • External (Your Customers): Every customer interaction hinges on performance. Context-rich observability lets your teams take data-driven action on issues faster, so you can stop guessing and start knowing.
  • Internal (Your Teams): Good observability data is fuel for speed and confidence. You can't hire your way out of slow feedback loops. You have to fix the system. When engineers can see, understand, and act quickly, your whole organization moves faster, and safer.

Speakers:

• Charity Majors – CTO & Co-founder, Honeycomb
• James Governor – Co-founder & Analyst, RedMonk

Who Should Attend:

This session is for engineering and platform leaders, SREs, observability practitioners, and any executive responsible for balancing reliability, cost, and developer productivity in 2026 and beyond.