r/mlops•
frisbeema52

Why is regular telemetry so expensive in LLM observability tools?

Tools: paid 💸

I've been comparing monitoring tools for LLM apps, and I can't get past the pricing. They're often much more expensive than regular observability tools.

I understand charging more for LLM traces. Counting tokens, calculating model costs, and storing huge prompts and responses all require extra work. But agents also produce a lot of normal data, like REST requests and database queries. Why should that data be billed at the same rate as an LLM trace?

This pricing pushes teams to drop non-LLM data to save money. Then something breaks, and the context that could explain the root cause is gone. You either fly blind or spend longer debugging the incident.

Am I missing something here? Shouldn't LLM traces and regular telemetry have different prices?

Posted Jul 13, 2026, 4:28 PM UTC

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