Case study · Payments · Datadog HealthScan
A plan to cut log costs without putting compliance at risk
A UK payments company now has a clear plan to keep audit logs searchable for 90 days at a lower cost per log.
At a glance
Around 45%
of the largest Kubernetes log source removable (estimated)
90 days
of searchable retention, at lower cost
30/60/90 day
plan the team can act on
PaymentsUKCompliance-ledAWSKubernetesDatadog Log ManagementDatadog HealthScan
01
The challenge
The challenge
Datadog makes it easy to send every log to a searchable index, and that is how log costs grow: a retention setting chosen to be safe for compliance ends up applied to routine traffic nobody decided to keep. This company must keep audit logs searchable for 90 days. It chose an independent review early, and wanted a plan its engineers could act on without putting compliance at risk.
02
What we did
What we did
- Analysed a week of log traffic in Datadog to show where the volume really came from.
- Separated routine monitoring traffic from the audit records the company has to keep.
- Recommended making 90-day retention a deliberate, owned choice rather than the default.
- Proposed Datadog's lower-cost long-retention tier for the full compliance period.
- Reviewed the wider Datadog setup and produced a prioritised backlog and 30/60/90 day plan.
03
The outcome
The outcome
- Around 45% of the largest Kubernetes log source identified as removable from indexing (estimated), with no audit records lost.
- A route to meet the 90-day requirement at a lower cost per log.
- The full audit record stays in the archive: nothing is deleted.
- A backlog the engineering team could turn straight into tasks.
This case study is anonymised, so the customer is not named.
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