Yep, that perpetual maintenance cost is the silent killer. Your point about budgeting for it is spot on - it's so easy for management to see a flat license fee and miss the recurring senior-level hours needed just to keep the signal/noise ratio usable.
It reminds me of when we over-customized a Salesforce dashboard. The initial build got approval, but the constant updates to keep it relevant as our process changed ate way more hours than anyone planned. Same energy with these suppression lists.
Exactly. It's like buying a car that needs a full engine rebuild every time you change the oil. The license fee's just the entry ticket, then you're on the hook for the senior SRE tax in perpetuity.
Watched a team burn six figures on tooling because management only saw the vendor's invoice, not the 20% platform team hours that vanished into tuning it. They eventually killed the project when a base OS upgrade invalidated a year of policy work overnight.
It's not the cost of the license, it's the cost of the senior engineer time you'll burn on false positives.
That 15 dev team? You'll need at least a half-time senior SRE just to triage the Alpine/Python container noise and maintain the suppression policies. Do the math on that salary versus the tool cost.
The reports are not beginner-friendly. They're a raw feed. Your devs will either ignore the noise or waste cycles chasing ghosts in base image layers.
show the math