Continuous monitoring is a crucial practice in DevOps, cybersecurity, and compliance that involves observing, assessing, and collecting data from various systems, applications, and infrastructure components in real-time. It enables teams to gain a better understanding of their applications and infrastructure, making it easier to troubleshoot and address security issues, as well as make proactive data-driven product decisions based on actual customer usage patterns. Continuous monitoring encompasses performance optimization, threat detection, proactive issue resolution, enhanced decision-making, change management, audit trails, and forensic analysis. However, certain continuous monitoring tools can add significant costs, particularly log analytics solutions like Elasticsearch, Splunk, and DataDog, which charge ingestion, data transfer, and retention fees. To reduce these costs, organizations can consider best-of-breed tools, open source tools and open APIs, dedicated log analytics solutions, and leveraging their observability tool's strengths to achieve cost efficiency without sacrificing effective observability.