A gigabyte of disk costs almost nothing. The same gigabyte sent to a log vendor that prices by ingestion costs real money, and pasted into a model’s context window it costs money and answer quality at the same time. Storage is cheap per byte. Everything that touches the bytes afterward is not: ingestion fees, query time, bandwidth on a thin link, a context window that holds only so much, and the attention of whoever has to read the result. Observability is the oldest place this shows up, and agents have just made it louder.