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Anonymized case study

One run. 71 checks. $114,000–178,000 a year to optimize.

A customer that is a very large shipping company: several thousand hosts, more than 100 applications and several Kubernetes clusters. What follows is the whole run — what was found, what each finding was worth, how it was computed, and what the customer did about it.
Book the same run What an audit covers
Several thousand
hosts under monitoring
100+
applications
69 of 71
checks completed
0
write operations

What the run found

Seven findings carried a number large enough to act on. Each one has the source behind it and the list of objects it matched.
FindingScaleImpact
Full-Stack hosts with no monitored service 140 hosts $91,576 / year
Default metrics bucket at 462 days retention 1 bucket $22,455–$86,115 / year
Permanent or expired maintenance windows 1,617 Alerting silently suppressed
Hosts without cost-allocation tags 384 Chargeback impossible
Anomaly-detection overrides disabling alerting 106 Detection off at entity level
RUM applications with no traffic in 90 days 86 License and configuration waste
Log sources with email addresses in cleartext 50 sources · ~30.7M/day GDPR exposure
Computed with the customer’s negotiated rate card, not list price. The range reflects a retention decision that was theirs to make. A cost is never added to a saving.

How the numbers were computed

The run touched nothing. Every check only reads: no setting was changed, nothing was installed, and no operational risk was created. Access was granted read-only, issued by the customer for the run and revoked when it finished, and the report records that per check rather than as a blanket claim.
Two of the 71 checks did not complete — a result limit on the platform side, in an estate of this size — and both are reported as such. A check that could not run is not reported as clean, and without that rule no row in the report can be trusted.
Money is computed on the rates the customer negotiated in their contract, never list price, and annualised. Where the contractual rate allowed more than one reading, the finding shows a range rather than the end that flatters us: the data-retention line is $22,455–$86,115 for exactly that reason.
Cost is not netted against saving. The total at the top of this page is recoverable annual spend; where remediation would add cost, that figure appears on its own separate line — so the budget can be planned, not hoped for.

What the customer did next

The cheap, reversible things first

Maintenance windows and anomaly-detection overrides were reviewed within days. Re-enabling detection costs nothing and reverses in a click, and it was the change that most affected whether an incident would reach anyone.

The expensive, irreversible things deliberately

Retention reduction discards data permanently, so the bucket at 462 days went to the data owners with the annual figure attached rather than to a team member with a ticket. That decision took six weeks, which is the correct speed for it.

The structural things as a project

Cost-allocation tags on 384 hosts and masking rules on 50 log sources are implementation work with a change window, not audit output. They were scoped separately and priced separately.

Questions about this run

How long does it take to get from findings to money?

The run itself is a matter of hours. What takes time is the decisions: who owns each finding, what closes immediately and what goes into planning. At this customer the two largest lines — hosts with nothing to monitor on them, and data retention nobody had chosen — were dealt with inside a quarter, because both were a configuration change rather than a project.

What happens if we do nothing with the report?

The spend continues, and grows with the estate. Nothing is committed on your side: the report is yours either way, and even if you touch none of the findings, you have for the first time a number you can defend to your vendor and to your finance team.

Is this a typical result?

It is a large tenant, and the absolute figures scale with size. What repeats across tenants of every size is the shape: the biggest single line is consumption on hosts with nothing monitored on them, alerting has been suppressed by windows nobody closed, and no one has ever priced their retention. We would rather you took the shape as typical and the numbers as this customer’s.

What does the audit cost, and what do we keep?

The run is free and you keep the report either way — findings, sources and object lists. All of it is handed over in full when the run finishes, yours to prioritise, to fix, or to put straight into next quarter’s plan.

Can our team reproduce these numbers?

That is the design goal. Every finding ships with the exact source behind it and a CSV of the objects it matched, and another AudiTrace run next quarter returns the same number — with your own monitoring teams, with us, or without us.

The same 71 checks, on your tenant, read-only.

One run, one report, and the source behind every line of it. You keep the report either way.
Book the same run See how AudiTrace works

Find out what your Obervability is actually doing.

An audit takes one run. The findings take one meeting. What you do with them is up to you.
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