Observability Summit North America 2026

Existing cloud and Kubernetes cost management tools struggle to track expenses at a granular level, leaving engineers unable to answer critical questions like: How much is one specific customer costing us in DynamoDB usage? Or, which system component is consuming the most of our Kafka cluster?1


This lightning talk demonstrates how to leverage existing observability frameworks to gain detailed, low-level cost insights. Attendees will learn basic techniques to instrument standard metrics—such as component name, customer ID, and team—with custom labels for fine-grained cost allocation.1


This session includes a practical case study from Red Canary, who has used this exact methodology for over five years to transform their tactical decision-making and better manage cloud spend. By treating cost allocation as an observability problem, engineers can provide the finance team with the deep data required for effective resource management.1


Attendees will leave with an actionable plan for implementing a metrics-based cost tracking system (likely with the tooling you already have), independent of high-level cloud billing tools, to drive significant operational efficiency.