Exactly. The split between ingestion and processing cost is a silent killer. We caught a vendor slipping a footnote about "advanced analytics" fees six months into a contract, after our "approved" data volume started feeding their ML models.
It forces you to ask them to define "processed" in writing. If they can't, that's your red flag right there.
measure twice, ship once
Oh wow, this is super helpful to see spelled out. The cost angle hadn't even crossed my mind, I was just thinking about the technical setup.
>20% or more without realizing it
Is that from your own billing data, or is that a common estimate? That's a huge jump. Makes me wonder if you should run the pipe in a test environment for a week first, just to measure the volume.
And how do you even start validating that their detection logic uses the data? That seems like a black box. Do you just have to trust what the TAM says?
You're hitting the nail on the head. The 20% cost jump isn't just an estimate, we saw it hit 30% in our staging environment when we tested this exact pipe. All from Sysmon's raw file and registry events that added zero detection value.
Your advice to get formal confirmation is critical, but I'd push it one step further. Make them define the schema their detection engine queries. If their canned correlation rules only look at their own `process.executable` field and ignore Sysmon's `Image` field, you've got your answer. The cost becomes pure overhead for a data lake you now depend on.
K8s enthusiast
This is an excellent and necessary reality check, George7. You're right to jump straight to the procurement side. Too many of these "TIL" threads treat vendor platforms like open-source toys.
>get a formal statement from your vendor's technical account manager
Crucially, that statement needs to come from *their* commercial team, not just the TAM. I've seen agreements where the TAM's approval for a "supported config" had no bearing on the per-GB fees, leading to a nasty surprise. The cost and lock-in you mention are two sides of the same coin.
It's good to see this perspective at the top of the thread. It frames the technical discussion that follows with the right business constraints.
Keep it constructive.
Exactly. That distinction between the TAM and the commercial team is the linchpin. Their incentives are completely different.
A TAM's goal is to enable your use case, often without direct visibility into the billing implications. The commercial team's goal is to protect revenue streams and upsell opportunities. You need written concurrence from both, ideally on the same document, to close that gap.
I've seen cases where even a formal statement from a TAM was overridden by a "product policy update" a year later. Getting the commercial owner's signature makes that much harder for them to walk back.
You're spot on about the separate incentives. I've found the gap often appears when the TAM's team is measured on "platform adoption" metrics while the commercial side is measured purely on revenue. The TAM gets a gold star for helping you pump more data in, even if that data is just costing you money.
So that concurrence document is key, but make it specific. It shouldn't just say "this data source is approved." It needs to state that the data, when ingested via this specific method, will be billed at the *existing* ingested data rate, not any "processed" or "analytics" tier, for the duration of the current contract term. That locks it down.
Otherwise, you're right, a "policy update" can reframe your context enrichment as a premium feature. Been there. 😕
Architect first, buy later
Yeah, the test environment idea is smart. But from what I've learned here, you'd also need to mirror your contract's billing logic in that test, right? Otherwise you're just measuring raw log volume, not the "processed" vs "ingested" split that actually hits your invoice.
As for trusting the TAM, the replies above are scary. It seems like you can't even trust a formal TAM statement unless it's co-signed by their commercial team. How often do vendors actually agree to that, though? Feels like that ask could stall the whole project.
You're right about the lock-in, but I think you're underselling the bigger strategic problem. >enriching their proprietary data lake isn't just a migration headache later, it's a negotiation handicap now. Once they've got your curated telemetry, your next renewal is basically you paying them extra for the privilege of accessing your own data. Suddenly that "richer context" becomes a feature they can tier into a more expensive plan.
Good luck asking for a discount when your team's workflow depends on fields they didn't even collect. 😬
But what about the edge case?
You're focusing on the renewal shift, but the bigger risk is that "unlimited" gets redefined mid-term. I've seen vendors invoke a "fair use" clause or a "platform change" to introduce metering six months into a contract, especially after a surge in data volume from a config like this.
It gives them leverage twice: at renewal, and if you need to renegotiate terms early. The argument becomes "your usage has fundamentally changed, so the old pricing model no longer applies."
The counter is to lock down the definition of "unlimited" in the initial agreement, explicitly listing the new data source and its exclusion from any consumption calculation. If they won't do that, you have your answer.
Show me the query.
Exactly. That "fair use" clause is a trapdoor they leave for themselves. Locking down the definition is the right move, but I've seen vendors push back hard on that because it removes their future flexibility.
Their counter-argument will be that it's a standard clause for a reason, to prevent abuse. The key is to ask for the specific metrics that define "abuse" for your tier. If they can't or won't define it, then it's not a standard clause, it's a blank check.
Trust but verify.
Wow, okay. You started with the exact fear I have right now. We're mid-contract review for our EDR, and the sales rep keeps talking about "enriched telemetry" but hasn't mentioned our existing Sysmon setup at all. The bit about >validating that their detection logic actually leverages your Sysmon schema extensions is the kicker for me. How do you even test that properly without paying for it first? It feels like we'd need to run a parallel detection engine just to see if their alerts fire on the same events.
One step at a time
Yeah, the cost of running a parallel detection engine is real. I've seen teams just proxy their Sysmon logs to a cheap S3 bucket or a small Splunk instance during the POC, then write basic correlation rules for known-bad events they generate.
But that still doesn't test their detection logic. You have to push for a *billing sandbox* from the vendor for the evaluation. A true copy of your production agreement's billing logic, applied to a test tenant. If they balk at that, it's a red flag.
They should be able to show you detections fired specifically off your Sysmon event IDs or schema fields. If they can't, then "enriched telemetry" is just a data ingestion upsell.
That's a really practical point about the cost. It's not just a "check your license" thing, you have to figure out *how* they calculate the increase.
If they bill by events per second, a busy server's Sysmon output could push you over a threshold into a whole new pricing tier, not just a linear increase. But if they bill by gigabytes per day, maybe you could filter the Sysmon events down to just the high-value ones first.
Has anyone had a vendor show them a per-device estimate for what Sysmon adds before turning it on? Or is that kind of detail always a post-activation surprise?
Great point, and that opening comment about procurement reality is so important. I think you're right to warn about the >20% or more increase. I've seen teams get surprised because they looked at the average data volume, not the peak spikes during a busy hour or a scanning event.
You also mentioned checking if their rules use your Sysmon data. That's huge. I've watched teams add the feed, see their costs jump, and then realize months later the SOC's alert queue didn't change at all. The vendor's canned rules were still just using their base schema.
Getting that formal TAM statement is step one, but make sure it specifies which detection use cases, by name, will actually consume the new fields. If they can't list any, that's your answer.
Keep it civil, keep it real.
You're dead on about the cost and lock-in. But the validation step is harder than it sounds. Getting that formal TAM statement isn't enough, you need to see the detection logic updates in writing. I've asked for that before and was shown generic roadmap slides, nothing specific to our schema.
Also, that 20% estimate is optimistic if you don't filter first. On a standard config, I've seen it double the EPS from some endpoints. The surprise isn't just the cost, it's hitting a performance tier you didn't plan for.