Hey Vastly, thanks :)

Well the cost will depend on 3rd party provider you use.

With SAAS solutions like DataDog you will be on mercy of their payment plan, if they will decide to increase the price, the bill may really jump high.

With self-hosted solutions, you will pay for your own storage, which may be cheaper, but you've to maintain them.

In case of the telemetry data itself, you may conditionally increase the amount of spans you produce (simple env will do the trick for most of auto-instrumentation packages).

What you may find useful is that OpenTelemetry provides "sampling". This means, you may choose to record 1% of your traces. You may also provide your own sampling logic.

In general that does the trick for finding out the bottlenecks of the system and optimizing them, as you will find slow database queries even in 1% of traces.

However you may lose general visibility and in case of errors, have no related traces.