From vendors to vanguard: Airbnb’s hard-won lessons in observability ownership

Airbnb shares hard-won lessons from migrating its observability platform from third-party vendors to a custom in-house solution built on Prometheus across 1,000 services.

• •Vendor costs were rising without improving MTTD/MTTR, as vendors charge by data ingested rather than by insight quality, limiting Airbnb's ability to optimize workflows
• •Migration v1 failed by targeting the most complex service first, resulting in false alarms, misaligned dashboards, and high customer onboarding friction
• •Migration v2 succeeded by starting with a simpler, tractable service to validate the strategy, surface UX gaps early, and build organizational confidence
• •A metadata engine was built into the translation layer to migrate query intent rather than one-to-one queries, correcting flawed patterns like averaging values that should be p95