Last9 + Altinity Better Together with BYOC Observability

Your observability platform bill renewal is coming up and you’ve got some decisions to make. Leadership is adamant about reducing costs – even if it means yet another painful migration. Your SRE teams just wish that they could spend time improving the system instead of battling cardinality and run-away logging costs. Your engineers just want things to be easy.

Is there really an observability solution that can satisfy all of these stakeholders?

The observability industry is based on a simple bargain: in exchange for convenience, we ship all of our telemetry to a vendor’s back end, and we pay them (usually a lot!) based on the volume of data ingested and stored.

This works – for a while – but eventually the cracks begin to show. In such a scheme, costs don’t scale with the size of the system being monitored or with the value that the monitoring brings. In fact it’s usually the inverse – costs grow non-linearly with respect to system size, and as your pool of telemetry grows the value of each datapoint becomes less as it is lost in the noise.

The alternative – self hosting – is appealing. We give up the convenience of a SaaS in exchange for predictable and manageable costs. But convenience (or lack of it) has a cost as well.

What if we could have it both ways: the white-glove service and support of a SaaS with the predictable and affordable pricing of self-hosting – all running in our own cloud account and maintaining total ownership over all data.

Introducing Last9

Last9 offers just such a solution. It’s a complete unified platform for telemetry signals – metrics, traces, logs, and profiles – all in one product.

• Unified platform: metrics, logs, traces, profiles in one product for humans and agents alike
• Scale stats: 545M events/min, 61.2M concurrent users monitored, 12 of 20 largest live-streaming events
• Set up the twist: at this scale, Last9 itself needed a BYOC answer, not just a SaaS backend – which is exactly what they now offer their own customers

Why ClickHouse®?

At this scale, ClickHouse is an obvious choice for Last9’s datastore. According to CTO Aditya Godbole, ClickHouse provides the combination of cost and query performance that avoids making the types of sampling and retention tradeoffs that legacy vendors force on their customers.

With ClickHouse, operators can spend less time worrying about how their data is captured and stored, and more time analyzing the data for useful insights. 

Why Altinity?

When scaling Last9, the team quickly realized that the economics of a SaaS for data storage were unsustainable. And as a SaaS vendor themselves, it was important to maintain as much control over customer data as possible. This meant running ClickHouse in customers’ own environment. That’s where Last9 Glassbox was born where the entire Last9 setup is installed in the customer environment.

Altinity BYOC allows Last9 to do just that with a shared responsibility model. Everything runs in their customers’ cloud account, while Altinity owns the operational burden of keeping ClickHouse fully operational.

By combining Last9 Glassbox with Altinity BYOC, customers get a complete observability solution in their own environment, backed by a database with a round-the-clock team of SREs and DBAs keeping everything running smoothly 24/7. 

“As a CEO, my favorite thing about Altinity is that I never have to hear about problems with ClickHouse.” – Nishant

The BYOC benefit — ownership and control, end to end

With a complete BYOC model backed by enterprise support of Altinity and Last9, you:

• Maintain complete ownership and control of your data – without having to own the maintenance of a database or lakehouse
• Avoid vendor-lock in with a completely open source storage layer
• Benefit from predictable and affordable capacity-based pricing
• Never again have to rush a migration before a renewal bill comes due

Get Started

Get started today. Schedule a free consultation – or if you’re ready to dive right in, Last9 and Altinity BYOC are both available on the AWS Marketplace here and here.