Hey everyone! 👋 I've been diving deep into the observability space lately, specifically looking for a cost-effective platform that can handle our growing telemetry data without breaking the bank. Like many of you, I'm wary of vendor pricing that seems simple upfront but hides massive ingest fees.
Coralogix has been on my radar because of their recent shift to what they call an "unlimited" pricing model. They claim you pay based on active data (analyzed/queried) rather than ingested volume, which sounds like a potential game-changer for high-cardinality environments. But as we all know in martech, "unlimited" often comes with invisible fences.
I've been doing my usual side-by-side comparison, but I'd love real-world anecdotes before I run a pilot. My main questions are:
* **Is the "unlimited" ingest claim real in practice?** Have you hit any hard throttles or shaming limits when you suddenly spiked your log or metric volume?
* **How does the "active vs. total data" calculation feel?** In our world, we might ingest massive volumes for compliance, but only query recent data for alerting. Does the pricing truly reflect that, or are there caveats?
* **Compared to platforms like Datadog or New Relic,** where you pay per GB ingested and per host, has the Coralogix model led to tangible savings? I'm particularly curious about scenarios involving:
* Ephemeral cloud environments (spinning up many short-lived containers).
* High-cardinality data (like unique customer IDs in traces).
* Storing data for long-term lookbacks (30-90 days).
If you've made the switch or done a trial, I'd love to hear about the nitty-gritty details. What was your actual experience with query latency on their newer storage engine? How flexible and reliable did you find their alerting compared to more established players? Any gotchas during implementation would be super helpful to know!
test everything twice
Oh man, I totally feel you on the "unlimited" skepticism. We've been on their new plan for about three months, handling some pretty wild event data from our marketing pipelines.
So far, the ingest claim has held up for us. We had a huge spike last month from a misconfigured campaign tracker, and there was no hard throttle. The cost that month was actually pretty reasonable, because we weren't querying all that garbage data. The real test is how they define "active" data. For us, it's based on what you search or alert on within a 30-day window, which matches our pattern well.
Compared to our old platform (Datadog), the billing is genuinely different and has saved us money. The catch? If you have a compliance requirement to *query* historical data regularly, that "active" data pool grows. It's not a caveat they hide, but you need to model your access patterns.
Automate everything.