Questions we hear most often.

Cardinal is an observability data lake plus an agent runtime. Your OpenTelemetry data stays in your own object storage; agents use pre-built skills to investigate it and produce evidence-backed answers. Cardinal supports PromQL and LogQL natively.

Traditional tools were designed around dashboards and shared query capacity for human operators. Cardinal keeps full-fidelity telemetry in your object storage and gives agents dedicated investigation compute, so they can test hypotheses at machine scale without moving data to a vendor-managed store.

Cardinal works with logs, metrics, and traces. It is designed around OpenTelemetry and indexes telemetry in your own object storage.

It depends. We prefer OpenTelemetry-native instrumentation, but in general, telemetry the OpenTelemetry Collector can receive can be converted and used by Cardinal. Cardinal does not require a proprietary host agent.

In your object storage (S3, GCS, or Azure Blob). Cardinal indexes it in place; data never leaves your cloud account.

No. Cardinal keeps every signal at full fidelity. Sampling is a choice you make, not a default we force.

No. Your data is in your cloud, not ours.

You retain control of the network boundary, IAM, object storage, and key management. Cardinal's data plane runs against your infrastructure rather than copying telemetry into a shared vendor data plane.

Yes. Cardinal supports customer-managed KMS keys, with no shared encryption for your telemetry data.

Account, control-plane, and website information are handled separately from customer telemetry. See our Privacy Policy for the personal-data categories we collect, how we use them, and how to make a privacy request.

Telemetry retention follows the policy you set on your own object storage. For account and control-plane personal data, see our Privacy Policy and contact privacy@cardinalhq.io to exercise applicable privacy rights.

Cardinal can run in AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, against Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, or Azure Blob Storage. On-premises works too: Cardinal needs Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, S3-compatible object storage such as Ceph, and enough headroom to scale query capacity up during investigations and back down when quiet.

The control plane supports SSO, SCIM, role-based access control, and audit logs. Your telemetry remains in your object storage, under your cloud account's IAM and network controls.

Yes. Cardinal is SOC 2 Type II certified. Because telemetry stays in your own object storage under your IAM and encryption controls, the compliance surface is smaller than with vendor-hosted observability. Contact us to request the report.

Cardinal is built to help agents investigate and produce evidence-backed answers. Your team controls the surrounding cloud access, credentials, and any action an agent is permitted to take.

Nothing. Your license is the same. Cardinal is priced by how you run us — either a flat In-your-cloud plan (Free / Production / Enterprise), or by the CCUs we operate in Cardinal's cloud. Neither meter moves when a service gets noisier.

Log everything. Retain everything. That's the point. In your cloud, storage is yours and there is no ingest meter to trip. In Cardinal's cloud, a CCU absorbs bursts up to about 20% headroom before the calculator suggests adding capacity — and the "add capacity" decision is yours, not an auto-charge.

Data residency and operations model. If the data has to stay in your VPC — compliance, sovereignty, existing S3, network egress cost — pick In your cloud. If you want zero infrastructure to run and a single monthly bill, pick In Cardinal's cloud. Both are managed by Cardinal end-to-end; the product is identical.

A CCU is the standard slice of Cardinal we operate on your behalf — 2 vCPU + 4 GB of dedicated capacity, plus the compute, storage, 30-day retention, software upgrades, monitoring, and 24×7 operations that go with it. The pricing page calculator estimates how many you'll need from your log/metric/trace volume and engineer count.

Yes. In your cloud, Free is a 3-month evaluation license — full product, no card, no volume cap, hard cutoff at 90 days with a 30-day grace notice. In Cardinal's cloud, Free is forever under 100 GB/day of ingest (0.1 TB/day) with 30-day retention.

First data usually lands in about 10 minutes for OTEL-instrumented workloads. Full migration timelines depend on your existing footprint; see the Migrations page for playbooks.

Yes. Keep your incumbent live, write telemetry to your own bucket, and run Cardinal alongside it for as long as you need. Your storage and instrumentation remain portable throughout the cutover.

It's a play on words: we love cardinality.

Cardinal was founded by ex-Netflix Observability Platform engineers, building observability infrastructure for agents from experience operating large-scale telemetry systems. Learn more on our About page.

Start with the documentation, then reach us through the community Slack, email, or a demo conversation. Cardinal also operates BYOC deployments with customers rather than handing over a deployment and disappearing.