At Ford, we have been emphasizing the importance of cost-cutting and saving money to protect jobs. However, in one part of our company, the Cloud Platform (Model E) division, it appears that we are allocating a significant budget to a tool called Splunk, even when free alternatives are available. According to our Chief (Mr. LL3), the majority of our applications (approximately 60-70%) have transitioned to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). GCP provides observability capabilities similar to Splunk, and these are included in the computing cost.
Despite this, almost all of our applications and services continue to use Splunk for monitoring purposes. This choice incurs a cost of approximately $6 per day for every 1 GB of data. If all our applications collectively consume 10,000 GB of data, it translates to a daily expense of $60,000 or a monthly cost of $1.8 million.
The pressing question here is why we are spending so much when GCP offers comparable monitoring capabilities for free. This situation raises concerns about the effectiveness of our technical leadership. If Mr. LL3 is unable to make more cost-effective technical decisions, perhaps it's time for him to consider stepping down. Doing so might enable us to allocate these funds more wisely and potentially save jobs.
OR - is there a personal gain involved in this spending? Food for thoughts!!!