Question 1

What is Scout from base14?

Accepted Answer

Scout is our observability platform that consolidates all observability signals into a single unified data lake, providing a comprehensive view of your production environment. Learn more about Scout features in our platform overview.

Question 2

How is Scout different from traditional monitoring tools?

Accepted Answer

Scout eliminates the need for multiple monitoring tools by providing a single observability data lake for all observability signals. It's built on OpenTelemetry standards and offers real-time monitoring and lightning fast exploratory querying capabilities. See our comparison with traditional tools.

Question 3

What kind of support does Scout provide?

Accepted Answer

Scout provides proactive expert support including custom dashboard design, alert optimization, noise reduction, performance tuning, and regular check-ins (weekly) and quarterly reviews with your technology teams. Contact our support team.

Question 4

Why is base14 Scout faster than other tools?

Accepted Answer

base14 utilizes the best in class open source analytics database technologies to build your observability data lake. We ensure efficient hardware is allocated and monitored real-time to ensure that your data is always available, at warp speed. Our architecture delivers sub-second query responses even on massive datasets.

Question 5

Can I deploy Scout in my own cloud account?

Accepted Answer

Yes! We offer BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) deployment where base14 Scout runs entirely in your AWS, GCP or Azure account. Your observability data never leaves your infrastructure, ensuring complete data sovereignty and compliance with strict regulatory requirements.

Question 6

Can Scout scale with our growing infrastructure?

Accepted Answer

Absolutely. Scout is designed to scale horizontally and can handle petabytes of data with consistent performance. Our cloud-native architecture automatically scales to meet your needs, from startups to enterprise deployments.

Question 7

How long does Scout retain my data?

Accepted Answer

Every plan includes 30 days of hot, full-resolution retention on disk. Beyond that, you can provide your own S3-compatible bucket (S3, MinIO, GCS and more) and retain data perpetually — it stays warm and queryable. APM and RUM summaries are kept for 180 days by default, so anomaly detection learns from six months of baselines. Talk to us to enable extended retention.

Question 8

How much log data can Scout handle?

Accepted Answer

Scout can ingest millions of logs per second. Your plan includes 30 days of hot, full-resolution retention on disk; beyond that, logs can move to your own S3-compatible bucket and be retained for as long as you like. Our advanced compression reduces storage costs by up to 80% compared to other tools, allowing you to keep all your logs without sampling.

Question 9

Can I search through historical logs?

Accepted Answer

Yes! Every plan includes 30 days of hot, on-disk retention, and APM and RUM summaries are kept for 180 days by default. Beyond 30 days, provide your own S3-compatible bucket and retain telemetry indefinitely — contact us to enable it. All data stays warm: the same fast query performance at any age.

Question 10

What types of metrics can Scout collect?

Accepted Answer

Scout can collect any type of metric from your applications and infrastructure including counters, gauges, histograms, and summaries. We support high-cardinality metrics and can handle millions of unique time series.

Question 11

Can Scout handle high-cardinality metrics?

Accepted Answer

Yes! Scout is built to handle high-cardinality metrics at scale. Our platform can efficiently store and query millions of unique time series without the performance degradation seen in traditional monitoring tools.

Question 12

How does Scout handle high-volume tracing?

Accepted Answer

Scout can handle traces with 100,000+ spans efficiently. Our distributed tracing engine is built to scale with your architecture, providing sub-second query performance even for complex trace analysis across thousands of services. Get started with our auto-instrumentation guides.

Question 13

How does Scout help with debugging microservices?

Accepted Answer

Scout provides end-to-end visibility of request flows, automatic service dependency mapping, and correlation with logs and metrics. You can quickly identify which service is causing latency, trace errors to their source, and understand the impact of service changes.

Question 14

How does Scout APM help with performance optimization?

Accepted Answer

Scout APM provides visibility into RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) across your entire application stack. It helps you identify slow queries, N+1 problems, and performance bottlenecks before they impact users, with automatic anomaly detection and smart alerting.

Question 15

How does base14 Scout monitor LLM applications?

Accepted Answer

base14 Scout traces every LLM call and agent run end to end on OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions: token usage, estimated cost, latency, tool calls, MCP calls, errors and evaluation scores, in the same traces, metrics and logs as the rest of your stack. No proprietary SDK.

Question 16

Can base14 Scout help reduce LLM API costs?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Scout records input and output tokens on every model call and estimates cost from a price table you control, so you can break spend down by model, agent, tool or customer, alert on cost spikes, and see which prompts or agents are driving the bill before switching models.

Question 17

How quickly can I set up AI observability?

Accepted Answer

Minutes, if your framework already emits OpenTelemetry GenAI telemetry or you use the official OpenTelemetry instrumentation for your model SDK: point the exporter at Scout and traces and metrics arrive. Follow the AI observability guides for a complete walkthrough per language and framework.

Question 18

What technologies does Scout support?

Accepted Answer

Scout is built on OpenTelemetry standards and can integrate seamlessly with most mainstream platforms and languages including Python, Java, Node.js, Go, .NET, and more. View our complete integration library.

Question 19

Is there a risk of vendor lock-in with Scout?

Accepted Answer

No, Scout is built on open-source technologies and OpenTelemetry standards, ensuring zero vendor lock-in and full transparency. Your data remains portable and you maintain complete control over your observability infrastructure.

Question 20

What's the difference between SaaS and BYOC deployment?

Accepted Answer

SaaS is our fully-managed cloud offering (fastest setup, we handle all infrastructure). BYOC deploys base14 Scout in your cloud account (you control infrastructure, we manage the platform). BYOC is ideal for teams with strict data residency, compliance, or security requirements.

Question 21

Which cloud providers support BYOC deployment?

Accepted Answer

We support BYOC deployment on AWS, GCP and Azure Cloud. The base14 team handles the complete setup and ongoing platform management, so you get control without operational burden.

Question 22

What languages and frameworks does Scout APM support?

Accepted Answer

Scout APM supports all OpenTelemetry-compatible languages and frameworks, including Java, Python, Node.js, Go, .NET, Ruby, and more. If it works with OpenTelemetry, it works with Scout - no proprietary agents required. See our framework instrumentation guides for step-by-step setup.

Question 23

Which LLM providers does base14 Scout support?

Accepted Answer

OpenAI, Anthropic and Google Gemini through the official OpenTelemetry GenAI instrumentation packages, plus Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint such as Azure OpenAI, Groq or DeepSeek through the OpenAI SDK. LiteLLM and vLLM telemetry can be collected directly. Anything that emits OpenTelemetry GenAI spans works.

Question 24

How does Scout's pricing work?

Accepted Answer

The Startup plan is a flat $250/month including up to 1 billion signals, then $0.10 per million metrics and $0.25 per million logs and traces beyond. No per-seat charges, no hidden fees, and still up to 80% cheaper than a traditional observability suite. Enterprise is custom-priced for higher limits and advanced features. Request a custom quote.

Question 25

How does base14 Scout reduce costs?

Accepted Answer

base14 Scout reduces data storage costs by up to 80% compared to other tools. We achieve this through best-in-class compression algorithms, efficient hardware utilization, and intelligent data retention policies.

Question 26

Do you offer a free trial or pilot program?

Accepted Answer

Yes — the pilot is free and open to anyone. We tailor each pilot to your stack and goals and run it on your production data, so it starts with a short call. Contact us to start your pilot.

Question 27

How does Scout reduce log management costs?

Accepted Answer

Through intelligent compression and volume-based pricing, Scout reduces log storage costs by up to 80%. Unlike other platforms, we don't charge for log ingestion or user seats, only for storage and compute used.

Question 28

What happens to our data if we decide to leave?

Accepted Answer

Your data is yours. We provide full data export capabilities and support for migrating to any OpenTelemetry-compatible platform. There are no penalties or fees for leaving, and we'll assist with the transition process.

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