Traditional data pipeline challenges require a dedicated platform management partner.
Apto Solutions brings enterprise expertise in Cribl, OpenTelemetry, and data routing to optimise your pipelines, reduce costs, and eliminate vendor lock-in.
The Problem: Data Sprawl Is Costing You More Than You Think
Most organisations manage data with a critical blind spot: data source sprawl. Multiple teams ingest data separately, creating duplicates, incompatible formats, and vendor lock-in. Without a dedicated platform managing this infrastructure, costs spiral and data quality suffers.
Common problems:
- Duplicate data ingestion from the same source → inflated SIEM licence bills
- Vendor lock-in with proprietary data formats → difficult to switch tools
- No visibility into pipeline architecture → impossible to optimise costs
The Problem: Data Sprawl & Runaway Costs
A centralised data platform with Cribl Stream and OpenTelemetry as your foundation eliminates duplicates, standardises formats, and routes data efficiently to SIEM, observability, and data lake destinations.
The Platform Management Gap — Data Lens
Organisations typically have three distinct data roles:
The Challenge
Data Analysts & Engineers consume data for security monitoring, observability, and analytics. Data Engineers build integrations and ETL pipelines. But who manages the pipeline infrastructure 24/7/365? Usually nobody.
This gap means:
- Nobody owns data pipeline health and performance
- Cost optimisation initiatives stall without operational oversight
- Duplicate ingestion and vendor lock-in persist unaddressed
How Apto Solves It: Telemetry as a Service (TaaS)
Apto Solutions fills the pipeline management gap with Telemetry as a Service (TaaS) — traditionally known as Managed Data Pipelines & Routing. We combine the Assess → Build → Operate lifecycle with dedicated platform expertise in Cribl and OpenTelemetry to design, deploy, and manage your data infrastructure.
Phase Details
Assess: We map all data sources, audit current ingestion patterns, identify cost drivers, detect redundancy, and assess vendor lock-in risk.
Build: We architect vendor-neutral pipelines using Cribl and OpenTelemetry, define routing rules, normalise data formats, and implement deduplication and filtering strategies.
Operate: We monitor pipeline health 24/7, optimise volumes, manage costs, respond to incidents, tune performance, and deliver compliance reporting.
Assess → Build → Operate (For Data Pipelines)
The Operate + Build Virtuous Cycle
Operating a data pipeline continuously surfaces optimisation opportunities:
How it works
Operate: We monitor pipeline performance and identify inefficiencies in real-time.
Build: Findings inform architecture improvements—new routing rules, filters, sampling strategies.
Measure: Improvements are deployed and measured—cost savings, better data quality, reduced vendor lock-in.
Repeat: New operational insights feed back into the cycle, driving continuous optimisation.
This creates a flywheel where operational excellence drives architectural innovation and cost control.
Pipeline Optimisation Pays for Itself
The biggest cost driver in data pipelines is licence fees. Most SIEM and observability solutions charge per GB of data ingested. By reducing duplicate and unnecessary ingestion through intelligent routing and filtering, organisations typically achieve:
- 30–50% reduction in total data ingestion
- Proportional reduction in SIEM and observability licence costs
- Elimination of vendor lock-in risk through vendor-neutral architecture
Typically, the cost of operating a managed data pipeline infrastructure is offset within 3–6 months.
Example ROI Calculation
A typical enterprise with Splunk ingesting 5 TB/day pays approximately £400K/year in licence costs. By reducing ingestion to 2.75 TB/day (45% reduction) through Cribl-based deduplication and filtering:
Platform Expertise: Cribl & OpenTelemetry
Apto partners with two industry-leading platforms to deliver flexible, vendor-neutral data routing.
Platform Expertise: Complementary Solutions
Why These Platforms?
Cribl Stream is the universal data routing hub. It collects from all sources, normalises formats, deduplicates data, and routes to any destination.
Cribl Edge extends this to the edge, enabling pre-filtering and sampling at source.
OpenTelemetry is the CNCF-standardised, vendor-neutral telemetry framework. It ensures your data isn’t locked into any single platform, enabling future flexibility and interoperability.
Together, they form the foundation of truly flexible data architecture.
What Is Included in Telemetry as a Service (TaaS)
Our TaaS offering covers three critical dimensions of data pipeline management:
Case Study: Enterprise Data Cost Optimisation
The Challenge
A UK financial services enterprise was using Splunk as their primary SIEM platform. Over several years, data ingestion had grown to 5.2 TB per day as new sources were connected—but many sources were ingesting duplicate data. Splunk costs had spiralled to £420K annually, with no clear visibility into what data was actually being used or needed.
The Approach
Apto conducted a comprehensive data source audit (Assess phase), identifying 1.3 TB of duplicate daily ingestion and 400 GB of unused data. We then designed a vendor-neutral pipeline architecture using Cribl Stream and OpenTelemetry (Build phase) that:
- Eliminated duplicate ingestion across firewall and application logs
- Implemented intelligent filtering to route only relevant data to Splunk
- Added Cribl Edge processors to pre-filter data at source, reducing transmission volume
The Outcome
45% reduction in daily ingestion volume (5.2 TB → 2.86 TB)
Annual Splunk licence cost reduction: £180K/year
Improved security posture: better visibility into relevant security events
Vendor flexibility: OpenTelemetry-based architecture enables future SIEM alternatives
Apto now operates the pipeline (Operate phase), managing it 24/7 and continuously optimising routing rules based on new data patterns and cost opportunities.
See how we can build your digital capability,
call us on +44(0)845 226 3351 or send us an email…