As cloud-native adoption grows, so do telemetry volumes, and with them, observability bills. High-cardinality metrics, distributed traces, and logs are essential for modern applications, but they come at a steep cost. Centralized vendor platforms exacerbate this with usage-based billing, while open source stacks, though cost-effective, often lack a unified control plane.

What if we decouple the control plane from the data plane?

In this talk, we’ll explore Federated Control Planes as an architectural pattern for building cost-effective observability with on-demand telemetry retrieval. We’ll show how OpenTelemetry plays a central role in making this possible, and share the challenges, trade-offs, and lessons learned from real-world implementations.