First, check what you can fix in place.
Review indexing, retention, unused products, cardinality and duplicate telemetry. If the current platform meets your needs, an optimization sprint may deliver a better return than a migration.
| Approach | Good fit | What to account for |
|---|---|---|
| Grafana + Prometheus / Loki | Infrastructure metrics, service dashboards and correlated operational views. | Label design, retention, storage, upgrades and your team’s operating time. |
| Elastic / ELK | Search-heavy logs and rich investigation workflows. | Indexing cost, sizing, licensed features and the terms of managed delivery. |
| OpenSearch | Search and log analytics when its features and Apache 2.0 licensing fit. | Compatibility, plugin behavior, migration tests and operating effort. |
| Cloud monitoring | Lean teams that benefit from reducing backend operations. | Usage limits, retention, data residency, vendor pricing and exit cost. |
Compare the total cost.
Vendor fees + infrastructure + engineering + transition cost
Estimate engineering effort honestly, including backups, upgrades, incident response and knowledge transfer. Amortize migration costs over a chosen period. Compare equivalent coverage and retention, not just ingest prices.
Illustrative arithmetic: a $12,000 migration that saves $1,000/month after extra operating costs takes 12 months to break even. If the extra operating cost eliminates the savings, there is no cost-only case for that migration.
Use the current product documentation.
Vendor pricing and licensing change. These primary sources are the starting point for a scoped review, not a guarantee of your final bill.
Reviewed September 7, 2026. Product names identify supported technologies, not a vendor partnership.