Lexicon
Egress costs
Egress costs are cloud fees for data leaving the provider's network. Why they quietly tax SaaS observability, and how telemetry volume makes them material.
Definition
Egress costs are the fees cloud providers charge for data leaving their network, priced per gigabyte and varying by destination. Inbound data is free; outbound data is a meter, and any architecture that continuously ships data out of a cloud account pays it forever.
What it means in observability
Egress is the tax nobody quotes. SaaS observability means streaming your telemetry from your cloud account to a vendor's, continuously, at whatever scale your systems produce it, and your cloud provider charges for every gigabyte of the trip. The line item lands on the cloud bill rather than the observability invoice, so it rarely appears in vendor cost comparisons, but at telemetry volumes it is real money: terabytes per day crossing the meter at cents per gigabyte compounds into a second observability bill wearing a cloud provider's logo.
How it works in practice
The mechanics are simple and unforgiving. Providers charge most for traffic leaving their network to the internet, less for cross region transfers, and little or nothing for traffic that stays inside a region. Telemetry is bulky by nature, verbose logs, high frequency metrics, span data multiplying per request, so the outbound stream scales with your success. The architectural implication runs the other way too: telemetry that terminates inside the same cloud account it originated in mostly never touches the meter.
Where it gets hard
Because the cost is structural, the mitigations all have teeth. Compression and filtering trim the stream but cannot change its direction. Sampling cuts egress by cutting coverage, paying for bandwidth with blind spots. Regional vendor endpoints reduce rates without eliminating the flow. The pattern underneath is the point: as long as observability means shipping data out, egress is a permanent line item that grows with your telemetry.
Where Tsuga fits
Tsuga's BYOC architecture keeps telemetry inside your own cloud account, so the continuous outbound stream, and the egress meter attached to it, largely disappears from the equation. The data stays where it was born; only the insights travel.
Related terms
- AWS CloudWatchAmazon CloudWatch is AWS's built in monitoring service: metrics, logs, alarms, and dashboards, with tracing through X-Ray, integrated by default with nearly every AWS service.
- BYOCBYOC, Bring Your Own Cloud, is a deployment model where a vendor's software runs inside the customer's own cloud account, operated by the vendor but living on infrastructure the customer owns.
- DatadogDatadog is the largest SaaS observability platform, spanning infrastructure monitoring, APM, logs, RUM, security, and dozens of adjacent products, collected largely through its proprietary agent and priced per product.
- SamplingSampling is the practice of keeping only a subset of telemetry, usually traces, so that volume and cost stay manageable.
- SplunkSplunk is the long standing leader in log analytics and SIEM, acquired by Cisco in 2024, offering log search through its SPL query language plus an observability suite spanning metrics and traces.
- TelemetryTelemetry is the data software and infrastructure emit about their own behavior.
- Vendor lock-inVendor lock-in is the accumulation of switching costs that makes leaving a platform impractical regardless of how the relationship is going: proprietary instrumentation, captive data, workflows that exist in only one tool, and contracts priced to reward staying.