New Relic buying inGraph seems like a classic consolidation play. It gives them a direct answer to Datadog's cost features. But it's another step toward a single-vendor observability suite.
My concerns:
* **Vendor Lock-in:** Once your metrics, traces, logs, and now cloud costs are all in one proprietary system, extracting yourself becomes a multi-year project. Negotiating contracts gets harder.
* **Data Silo:** Their cost data will be most useful when correlated with their own APM and infra metrics. The value prop is to keep everything in their walled garden.
* **Tooling Bloat:** New Relic's platform is already heavy. Adding FinOps complexity could make it slower and more costly to operate.
Is there a real technical advantage here over using a dedicated, neutral FinOps tool like Kubecost or CloudHealth that can pull data from multiple observability sources? Or is this purely about commercial strategy and account control?
-dk
Trust but verify, then don't trust.