CASE 47 · SLATE · 2025
Observability cost, brought back to earth.
A mobile gaming studio had a $61k/month CloudWatch Logs bill, primarily driven by Lambda execution logs at the most verbose tier, retained for 90 days "just in case." We applied a tiered retention policy, sampled the noisy log streams, and got the bill to $14k without losing investigative power.
Mobile gaming
COST
2025
RESULTS
What changed, by the numbers.
LOGS BILL
−77%
INVESTIGABLE WINDOW
90d
RETENTION TIERS
4
INGESTION VOLUME
−43%
HOW IT WENT
The "just in case" 90-day retention is the most expensive line item in many CloudWatch bills. We started by classifying log groups: critical (needed for incident response), useful (needed for week-old debugging), and ambient (mostly noise, occasionally useful for trend analysis).
Critical log groups stayed at 90 days, full ingestion. Useful groups moved to 14-day CloudWatch + Firehose-to-S3 with Athena for older queries. Ambient groups got structured sampling — 10% of events, with metric filters preserving the aggregate stats. Three high-volume Lambda log streams got their verbosity dropped from INFO to WARN.
The bill fell 77% in the first full month. Incident-response capability is unchanged. The two times the team needed to query logs older than 14 days, Athena did it in under a minute against the S3 archive.
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