Designing Chronosphere’s Flagship Cost Control Experience
Bringing Clarity to Data Costs
Chronosphere helps large companies make sense of huge amounts of data.
As that data grew, so did the challenge of keeping costs under control — and existing tools were too complex for most teams to manage.
This led to Chronosphere Cost Control, a flagship effort and the first time the company created a clear, visual way for users to see and manage their data costs directly.
My Role: Product Designer and researcher
Team: Sr. Product Manager · 5 Engineers
My Contribution: Research synthesis · Design strategy · Interaction design · System mapping
The Challenge — Unchecked Growth, Unclear Ownership
As observability data scaled across hundreds of services, new failure patterns emerged:
One team’s runaway metrics could drown out others (“noisy neighbors”).
Central teams struggled to delegate budgets or understand usage at a glance.
Developers couldn’t tell when data was delayed, shaped, or dropped.
What began as a cost problem became a trust problem — teams lost confidence in what data they were seeing.
Research Goals
Our goal was to understand how different user groups — from platform leads to developers — experience and manage observability costs. Because each role interacts with telemetry data differently, we needed to uncover not just what they do, but how they make decisions under cost pressure.
“How might we make complex cost governance transparent and usable — so every team can manage observability data with clarity and confidence?”
Uncover everyday trade-offs. Explore how teams decide what’s worth keeping, what can be delayed, and what can be cut when budgets tighten.
Find where clarity breaks down. Identify moments when users lose visibility into what’s happening with their data or why it’s being limited.
Discover ways to build trust. Understand what people need to feel confident making cost-related decisions on their own, without relying on others.
Design Strategy — Guardrails, Delegation, and Visibility
The goal was to transform a complex, behind-the-scenes system into a product that anyone could understand and use with confidence. The design was guided by three core ideas:
Set clear boundaries. Create simple guardrails that prevent teams from accidentally overspending or overwhelming the system.
Give teams ownership. Allow each group to make their own decisions within safe limits, instead of relying on a central team for every adjustment.
Make everything visible. Help users see what’s happening in real time — what’s being limited, what’s running smoothly, and why.
I began by creating rapid prototype low fidelity of key moments in the flow and shared the concept with the cross-functional team to gather feedback.
Solution — Making Control Visible
The project turned a complex, behind-the-scenes process into an approachable, visual experience where teams could clearly see and manage how their data behaved. What once required engineering commands and guesswork became an interactive system designed around four key experiences.
Visibility + Control: Users highlight that the platform gives them real insight into their data usage and budgets.
Cost Efficiency: Many comments point to significant data-volume reductions and cost savings.
Usability for Scale: The feedback emphasizes that the solution works in large, cloud-native and micro-services environments.
Trust & Reliability: Users feel confident in the platform — it’s not just about features, but about dependability when things scale.
Impact
Strategic Differentiation & Platform Value
Through this design work, the Cost Control experience expanded from managing only metrics to now giving users full control over logs, traces, and metrics — creating a unified cost governance system across the entire observability stack.
This advancement strengthened Chronosphere’s position as a comprehensive, cost-aware platform, helping customers gain clarity, consistency, and confidence in how they manage data and budgets at scale.
Customer Quotes
“Chronosphere takes the pain out of scaling Prometheus and managing Grafana. They also help us understand and manage our data.” — Software Engineer
“The product is mature and very well designed. It is fast, reliable and flexible to cover all our needs.” — Engineer, IT services industry
“Chronosphere’s game-changing platform gives us the visibility and control to manage our observability data, especially with our unprecedented growth.” — VP of Engineering
Post MVP
Predictive Budget Recommendations
Smart Shaping Suggestions
Personalized Insights