Maxfield Stewart
Every growing company hits the same wall: skyrocketing costs from metrics and logs. Riot Games was no exception: ingesting over a petabyte a month, we had to rethink everything.
In this talk, we’ll share how we tackled our ballooning observability bill. Not just with tools, but by reshaping engineering culture to make cost a shared responsibility. From clever process tweaks to accountability frameworks, we’ll show you what actually moved the needle.
Whether you're an IC drowning in dashboards or a leader staring down a budget cliff, this session will give you the insights (and battle scars) to take control of your telemetry spend.
Maxfield Stewart has been shipping software and supporting production environments for over 25 years. Having worked in private consulting for fortune 500 companies like Goldman Sachs and Sprint, to over a decade and a half in the game industry. For the last 12 years Max has been helping Riot transition to continuous delivery, micro-services and changing culture around production availability, RCA's, post-mortems and observability.
author = {Maxfield Stewart},
title = {Taming the Cost of Telemetry: How Riot Games Reined In Observability Costs},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
