# Ryo pilot checklist

Evaluate one telemetry source before expanding placement changes. This is an evaluation plan, not a statement that these capabilities have been verified.

## Establish the baseline

- Select one high-volume source and record its ingest volume, hot-tier retention, and actual bill contribution.
- Identify queries, dashboards, monitors, APM, and incident workflows that depend on it.
- Confirm retention, access, and regulatory requirements with the relevant owners.
- Choose representative investigation queries and agree on acceptable latency before the pilot.

## Verify the data path

- Confirm the full-fidelity copy reaches customer-owned storage; check counts, fields, timestamps, and representative records.
- Verify that routing policy preserves the data required by existing monitors and dashboards.
- Exercise downstream outages, retries, backpressure, duplicates, and malformed events. Document observed failure behavior.
- Test policy changes and rollback. Record operator time and any delivery gaps.
- Verify access controls and the ability to retrieve the underlying data independently of Ryo.

## Measure the economics

- Compare actual downstream billing changes, including contract minimums and commitments.
- Include Ryo charges, storage, requests, query compute, and data transfer.
- Record the retained volume and the fraction diverted from hot indexing; do not assume a target percentage.
- Compare total cost at the agreed retention period and query demand.

## Investigate excluded data

- Search records never sent to the hot tier using service, time, request ID, trace ID, structured fields, and text.
- Run queries across recent and older data, including sparse matches and broad searches.
- Measure end-to-end latency and cost under representative concurrency.
- Have an on-call engineer answer a real incident question using only the retained copy where practical.

## Decide

Proceed only if measured savings, data completeness, query usefulness, and operational burden meet the criteria agreed by your team. Document unresolved limitations and rollback ownership before expanding.