How many of your tables need paid observability coverage?

A vendor quote is priced for monitoring the entire warehouse. Nobody needs every table in it watched.

AdvancedRead 6 minDoing: the better part of a day, split between a warehouse query, a few quick checks with table owners, and writing up the recommendation7 steps

▶ Start

What you'll have at the end

A short list of the tables worth paying to monitor, picked by who actually queries them, not by table count

Before you start

You need

A list of the tables something downstream has actually queried in roughly the last month, and enough warehouse access to count, for each one, how many separate things read from it.

Not covered

Picking which platform to buy or negotiating its price once the list exists, and building the actual checks that run on each table once it earns a spot on it.

Leans on

7 steps

Where to go next

Open source or paid: choose your team's first data observability tool

do that one first if no per-table price exists yet to size this list against.

Checked 26 Aug 2026

Part of the Data Observability cookbook