Four Observability Platforms, 18 Months, One Decision
Every enterprise eventually runs Grafana, Datadog, Splunk, and Dynatrace at once — and someone gets 18 months to fix it. This interactive map skips the vendor bake-off and builds the framework: inventory what each platform uniquely owns, score the real switching costs, and decide — consolidate, federate via OpenTelemetry, or leave it alone — with a cost model that survives a CFO and a sequence that de-risks whichever path you pick.
How to actually run this
Don't work the board top to bottom. Settle Tier 1 first — the path (consolidate, federate, or leave it), the real trigger, and who owns the outcome — on a whiteboard with the people who'll live with the result. Getting the path and the owner right is worth more than every downstream optimization combined; an 18-month program with no owner past month six is already failing.
Tiers 2 and 3 are where honesty happens. Inventory what each platform uniquely owns — billing data, compliance retention, APM depth, the dashboards teams live in — before you assume anything is replaceable. Then score the real switching costs: agent re-instrumentation, query-language retraining, alert-rule migration, contract lock-in. These numbers, not the license delta, decide whether consolidation is even sane.
Tier 4 is where the decision becomes defensible — the cost model a CFO will accept (fully-loaded TCO, not a license swap), the conditions under which federation beats consolidation, and the honest case for leaving it alone. Tier 5 is where it lives or dies operationally: the 18-month sequence, and the one anti-pattern that kills most consolidations.
The failures cluster in predictable places, every one an early decision made late:
- Consolidating away a capability one platform uniquely owned.
- A cost model that counted the license delta and nothing else.
- A big-bang cutover with no dual-ship and no rollback.
- Migrating dashboards before anyone trusted the new tool.
The board's job is to drag those decisions forward, where they're cheap, instead of leaving them to surface in month fourteen, where they're not.
The highest-leverage decision in the set is the path itself — and the honest scoring of switching costs that justifies it. "Leave it alone" is a real answer, not a failure to decide, whenever the migration risk exceeds the license savings. And if you internalize one operational rule: migrate trust before you migrate dashboards. Every failed consolidation moves the graphs first and loses the people who were supposed to use them.