BizFirst Observe
PaaS Options Overview
Rather than running Loki, Prometheus, Tempo, and Grafana yourself, managed (PaaS) observability services handle infrastructure, scaling, and upgrades. BizFirstGO's OTel SDK makes switching providers as simple as changing the OTel Collector exporter configuration — no code changes required.
Self-Hosted vs. Managed — Decision Criteria
| Criteria | Choose Self-Hosted | Choose Managed (PaaS) |
|---|---|---|
| Data residency | Strict on-premises or specific cloud region required | Provider offers your required region |
| Team size | Dedicated platform team (3+ engineers) | Small team, no dedicated SRE |
| Scale | Very large scale where per-GB PaaS pricing is expensive | Small to medium scale |
| Compliance | Cannot use SaaS due to regulatory restrictions | Provider is compliant (SOC2, ISO27001) |
| Time to value | Accept 2-4 week setup time | Need observability running in days |
| Query languages | Want to use LogQL, PromQL, TraceQL directly | Comfortable with vendor query language (KQL, etc.) |
Provider Comparison Summary
| Provider | Log Query | Metrics Query | Tracing Query | Migration Effort from Self-Hosted |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Grafana Cloud | LogQL | PromQL | TraceQL | Lowest — same query languages |
| Azure Monitor | KQL | PromQL (via Managed Prometheus) | Application Insights | Medium — KQL is different from LogQL |
| AWS CloudWatch | CloudWatch Insights | CloudWatch Metrics | AWS X-Ray | High — proprietary query language |
| Datadog | Datadog Log Search | Datadog Metrics | Datadog APM | High — fully proprietary, high cost |
The OTel Collector Is Your Portability Layer
BizFirstGO sends telemetry to the OTel Collector via OTLP — a vendor-neutral format. To switch providers, change only the exporter section of otel-collector-config.yaml. The BizFirstGO services themselves require zero code changes. This is the primary reason BizFirst Observe uses OTel Collector as the central hub rather than SDK-direct-to-provider configurations.