EX.CO cuts observability costs by 50% - replacing Datadog and Cloudwatch with groundcover’s unified, usage-based model
EX․CO, the world’s leading machine learning-powered video technology platform, was facing a familiar challenge: growing systems, exploding data, and observability bills that kept climbing. They needed a simpler, more scalable solution, and found it all in groundcover.
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"groundcover gives us everything we need right out of the box, It’s clear, cost-effective, and easy for our developers to use."
About EX.CO
EX․CO is the leading machine learning video technology platform empowering media owners to monetize content across all screens—online video, CTV, and DOOH. Trusted by global publishers like Advance Local, The Arena Group, Hearst Newspapers, and News Corp, EX.CO's online video platform (OVP) includes a comprehensive, ML-driven infrastructure powering video monetization and engagement at scale.
As the company has grown, the volume and complexity of their observability data exploded. They needed a way to keep up, without losing visibility or breaking the budget.
The Challenge
For years,EX.CO relied on a fragmented observability stack: Coralogix and CloudWatch for logs, and eventually Datadog for APM. But as the company migrated fully to Kubernetes and scaled ML workloads across all environments, this patchwork approach began to show cracks:
- Partial Visibility: To control costs, APM was used only in production, leaving blind spots in staging and development.
- Operational Overhead: Maintaining observability required constant monitoring and tweaking, a work that a lean DevOps team couldn’t justify.
- Escalating Costs: After moving to Kubernetes, observability costs more than doubled, surpassing even their compute spend.
“We got a bill from Datadog that was more then double the cost of the entire EC2 instance”, said Sinai Rijcov, DevOps Engineer at EX.CO.
Why groundcover?
With limited engineering bandwidth, they needed a better path: an observability platform that was easy to manage, cost-predictable, and fully integrated across environments.
groundcover met EX.CO’s needs across the board
- All-in-one observability: Traces, logs, and metrics, everything developers need in one unified view.
- Zero blind spots: Full coverage across dev, staging, and production without worrying about sampling or hidden fees.
- Predictable pricing: Using groundcover, we know exactly what we’ll pay for each node and each request. It’s super fair and transparent.
- Fast, frictionless setup: "It took me less than a month to migrate the entire company from Datadog to groundcover," said Sinai. “One line of code, and everything was working.”
The Impact
With groundcover, EX.CO can finally scale observability with confidence
- 50% reduction in observability spend
By replacing Datadog and CloudWatch,EX.CO cut costs in half while gaining broader coverage. - Full environment coverage without sampling
All environments, including dev and staging, are monitored with complete, unsampled trace data. - Quick onboarding and minimal DevOps overhead
EX.CO migrated their entire stack to groundcover in under a month, with no need for complex setup or maintenance. - Self-hosted SaaS deployment that keeps data in their cloud
Observability data stays within EX.CO’s own infrastructure, aligning with security and compliance needs. - Simple, developer-friendly UI and service map
Teams gain instant visibility into their systems with an intuitive interface and real-time dynamic mapping.
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