How to Banish Anxiety, Lower MTTR, and Stay on Budget During Incident Response

Since I started in technology in 1992 (over three decades ago!), I’ve encountered countless scenarios where I was expected to “do more with less.” Whether it meant delivering more with fewer team members or working within constrained hardware resources, this mindset has been a recurring theme. One experience stands out from my time as a backend architect on a cloud modernization project. To reduce costs, we were asked to minimize or eliminate service-level logging — logging that we relied on heavily for debugging and incident analysis. The decision was driven by the high cost of log ingestion on our observability platform.