Beyond the Bill: Is Your Observability Licensing Helping or Hindering You?

An observability platform can promise a world of savings, but a rigid, outdated, or confusing licensing model can silently erode that value, trapping you in a cycle of surprise fees and budget overages.

The Licensing Labyrinth: Common Traps That Drain Your Budget

For many IT leaders, software licensing feels like a game they’re destined to lose. Vendors often rely on complex models designed to maximize their revenue, not your value. This forces you to navigate a labyrinth of hidden costs and frustrating limitations. Does any of this sound familiar?

• The "Gotcha" Fees: You’ve licensed your servers, but now you’re being charged extra for data ingestion, custom metrics, or API calls. These models punish you for using the platform more deeply, forcing you to choose between comprehensive visibility and a predictable bill. While everyone understands that new features can come at a cost, no one should expect surprise charges for expanding their use of existing capabilities. But still, many observability vendors routinely charge to ingest logs (for example, around $0.10/GB), then again to keep them searchable and to forward or query them. For a 200-server environment, that can typically result in around $3–4K per month in add-on fees, just for normal logging and tracing.
• The Hybrid Cloud Penalty: Your strategy is hybrid. Your workloads move between on-premises data centers and the cloud. Yet your vendor’s licensing model can’t keep up, forcing you to re-buy licenses for workloads you’ve simply moved—effectively creating a "cloud tax".
• The Bloat Tax: To get the one feature you desperately need, you’re forced to buy a different solution with capabilities you will likely never use but still have to pay for. This is “shelfware," and it inflates your costs without adding any real value. Many vendors will keep the one capability you need – for example, longer log retention or a specific data feature – in a higher-priced tier (e.g. $0.60/GB vs. $0.40/GB), so you have to upgrade the whole plan for a single checkbox.
• The Punishment for Curiosity: Your team identifies a new way to monitor a critical application on an already-licensed server. But flipping that switch requires a new "feature pack" or license add-on, discouraging exploration and locking valuable capabilities behind a paywall.

When your licensing model works against you, it undermines the very goal of observability, creating financial friction and operational hesitation when you can least afford it.

What Licensing Should Be: Simple, Flexible, and Predictable

Your observability platform is a strategic investment, and its licensing should reflect that. You need a model designed to support your growth and adapt to your changing environment.

An ideal licensing model should be:

1. Predictable: Costs should be transparent and straightforward, so you can plan your budget with confidence, knowing exactly what you’re paying for.
2. Flexible: It must be designed for the reality of modern hybrid IT. As your architecture evolves, your licensing should adapt seamlessly without penalty.
3. Comprehensive: It should encourage, not limit, visibility. Once you’ve licensed an entity for monitoring, you should have the freedom to observe it from multiple angles—infrastructure, network, application, logs—without incurring a barrage of extra fees.
4. A Better ROI: The model should maximize your return. As you leverage more of the platform’s capabilities, you should see more value, not just a bigger bill.

The SolarWinds Approach: Aligning Licensing With Your Goals

The SolarWinds Observability licensing model is designed to be straightforward and predictable, allowing you to scale without financial surprises.

The foundation of this approach for our self-hosted option is a simple, node-based licensing model.

A node is simply an entity you monitor, such as a server or network device. What this means for your team is that once a node is licensed, you can monitor it broadly across multiple domains—infrastructure, networks, applications, and logs—without having to purchase separate "feature packs." This frees you to explore your data and deepen your monitoring as needed, without the fear of triggering unexpected costs.

This approach is also designed to support your hybrid IT strategy. A node is counted the same way whether it resides in your data center or in the cloud, giving you the freedom to evolve your infrastructure without facing licensing penalties. Our SaaS observability option adheres to a similar node-based licensing model for network and infrastructure, including cloud services and containers (Note: we employ a 3:1 ratio for monitoring cloud services to nodes and a 10:1 ratio for monitored containers to nodes for pricing purposes).

Pairing predictability with flexibility, and recognizing that different organizations have different needs, our SaaS option, SolarWinds Observability SaaS, deploys a more modular approach where it makes sense, specifically for capabilities such as deep application, log, and digital experience observability, where a node-based pricing approach does not fit well with a SaaS delivery model. This modular, usage-based pricing ensures predictability and gives you the peace of mind that you are only paying for features that you use.

Ultimately, the goal is to provide a predictable and flexible path to observability. It’s about helping ensure the way you pay for your platform actively contributes to—rather than detracts from—your total cost of ownership and the ROI you can achieve.

Stay tuned for the final post in our series, where we’ll examine how you can quickly reclaim infrastructure budget and staff time with greater scalability and more flexible high availability for SolarWinds Observability Self-Hosted.