BYOC observability pitch grows

Observability tools are starting to sell a different promise at Google Cloud Next 2026: keep your machine data in your own cloud account, and run artificial intelligence on it there. (finance.yahoo.com) Observability is the software teams use to watch applications through metrics, logs, and traces — the numbers, event records, and request paths that show what broke and where. Google says Cloud Monitoring handles metrics, Cloud Logging stores logs in log buckets, and Cloud Trace stores trace data in observability buckets tied to the customer’s project. (docs.cloud.google.com ) (docs.cloud.google.com) Groundcover said on April 14 that it will use Google Cloud Next, scheduled for April 22-24 at Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, to show an “AI-native” observability product and a Google Vertex AI-powered “Agent Mode.” The company said the system investigates incidents and analyzes infrastructure behavior while telemetry stays inside the customer’s cloud environment. (marketwatch.com) (googlecloudevents.com) “Bring your own cloud,” or BYOC, means the vendor’s service runs in the customer’s Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud account instead of a shared software-as-a-service environment. Grafana markets the same model as a fully managed observability platform running in the customer’s AWS or Google Cloud account, while groundcover says its data plane runs in the customer’s cloud and remains under the customer’s control. (grafana.com) (groundcover.com) The pitch lines up with a specific enterprise concern: where telemetry is stored and who else’s systems sit next to it. Google’s documentation says Cloud Logging can regionalize log data and that organizations can restrict the locations of new log buckets, while Vertex AI documentation says data stored at rest remains in the customer-selected location. (cloud.google.com) (docs.cloud.google.com) The catch is that artificial intelligence location rules are more complicated than a booth slogan. Google says global Vertex AI endpoints improve availability, but “don’t guarantee data residency or in-region ML processing,” and regional processing guarantees depend on the endpoint and model used. (docs.cloud.google.com 1) (docs.cloud.google.com 2) That leaves vendors trying to combine two demands that used to pull in opposite directions: tight control over operational data and easier incident analysis with large language models. Groundcover said last month that its artificial intelligence mode became generally available for production analysis inside customer cloud environments, and this week’s Google Cloud Next preview extends that pitch to Google Vertex AI users. (newsbreak.com) (financialcontent.com) The broader market has been moving the same way beyond observability. ClickHouse said on March 31 that its BYOC offering on Google Cloud reached general availability, framing the model around native identity controls, virtual private cloud boundaries, and compliance needs inside Google Cloud. (clickhouse.com) Google Cloud Next opens April 22, and vendors will spend three days arguing that the safest place to analyze telemetry is the same place it was generated. (googlecloudevents.com)