--- title: The hidden cost of observability sprawl | daily.dev description: Platform teams scaling Kubernetes often resort to duplicating full observability stacks per tenant, leading to unsustainable costs and operational overhead. A... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-observability-sprawl-wymqgvwwx twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: The hidden cost of observability sprawl | daily.dev og:description: Platform teams scaling Kubernetes often resort to duplicating full observability stacks per tenant, leading to unsustainable costs and operational overhead. A... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-observability-sprawl-wymqgvwwx og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/wyMqgvWWx.png og:image:alt: The hidden cost of observability sprawl og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # The hidden cost of observability sprawl **[Red Hat Developer](https://daily.dev/sources/rhdev)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Platform teams scaling Kubernetes often resort to duplicating full observability stacks per tenant, leading to unsustainable costs and operational overhead. A smarter approach uses the OpenTelemetry Collector as a centralized routing layer combined with Kiali's multi-tenancy capabilities on OpenShift Service Mesh. Two tenancy models are covered: soft tenancy (shared backends with namespace-based attribute separation via Istio Telemetry CRs) and hard tenancy (dedicated backend stores per tenant). Both approaches use Kiali's discovery_selectors and Kubernetes RBAC to enforce namespace isolation. Detailed YAML configurations are provided for Kiali CRs, Istio extensionProviders, Telemetry CRs, and RBAC ClusterRoles/ClusterRoleBindings, enabling teams to route traces and metrics to different backends (Tempo, Prometheus, Loki) without duplicating the entire mesh infrastructure. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [How to observe your multi-cluster service mesh with Kiali](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-observe-your-multi-cluster-service-mesh-with-kiali-gb9spizhc) · Red Hat Developer · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [How to build a cost-effective observability platform with OpenTelemetry](https://daily.dev/posts/how-to-build-a-cost-effective-observability-platform-with-opentelemetry-z8pbichl4) · CNCF · 8 upvotes · 0 comments - [Which Observability Tool Helps with Visibility Without Overspend](https://daily.dev/posts/which-observability-tool-helps-with-visibility-without-overspend-opo41tsy3) · Last9 · 1 upvotes · 0 comments - [Observability on Kubernetes: OpenTelemetry, Camel & Quarkus](https://daily.dev/posts/observability-on-kubernetes-opentelemetry-camel-quarkus-q9gx7ah7s) · Piotr Minkowski TechBlog · 5 upvotes · 1 comments - [An End-to-End Cloud Native Observability Framework](https://daily.dev/posts/an-end-to-end-cloud-native-observability-framework-4gzq4zqow) · The New Stack · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#observability](https://daily.dev/tags/observability), [#opentelemetry](https://daily.dev/tags/opentelemetry), [#service-mesh](https://daily.dev/tags/service-mesh), [#multi-tenancy](https://daily.dev/tags/multi-tenancy) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-observability-sprawl-wymqgvwwx) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"The hidden cost of observability sprawl","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-observability-sprawl-wymqgvwwx","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/the-hidden-cost-of-observability-sprawl-wymqgvwwx"},"datePublished":"2026-07-24T03:21:05.716Z","dateModified":"2026-07-24T04:06:49.630Z","description":"Platform teams scaling Kubernetes often resort to duplicating full observability stacks per tenant, leading to unsustainable costs and operational overhead. 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