The Monitoring Tax
Every production application needs monitoring. You need to know when your service goes down, when error rates spike, when your database is running slow, and when users are experiencing latency.
The problem? Enterprise monitoring tools are eye-wateringly expensive.
| Tool | Starting Price |
|---|---|
| Datadog Infrastructure | $15/host/month |
| New Relic | $0.30/GB data ingested |
| Dynatrace | $0.08/GiB-hour |
| Grafana Cloud | Free up to 10k metrics |
| Pingdom | $15/month |
| PagerDuty | $21/user/month |
A startup with 5 servers running Datadog pays $75+/month just for basic infrastructure monitoring — before APM, logs, or alerting add-ons.
What PandaStack Monitor Includes
PandaStack Monitor is built into the platform. Every deployed application automatically gets:
Uptime Monitoring
- HTTP(S) endpoint checks every 60 seconds
- Check from multiple global regions
- SSL certificate expiry alerts (30, 14, 7 days before expiry)
- Custom status pages for each project
Performance Monitoring
- Response time percentiles (p50, p95, p99)
- Apdex score tracking
- Request rate (requests/second)
- Error rate percentage
Infrastructure Metrics
- CPU utilization per container
- Memory usage and limits
- Disk I/O
- Network throughput
Application Logs
- Real-time log streaming
- Log search and filtering
- 7-day retention (free), 30-day (paid), 90-day (business)
Alerting
- Email alerts (free)
- Slack integration (all plans)
- PagerDuty integration (Pro+)
- Custom webhooks (Pro+)
- Alert policies with thresholds and cooldown periods
Datadog: The Enterprise Standard
Datadog is the gold standard for enterprise monitoring. Its product suite is comprehensive:
- Infrastructure monitoring
- APM and distributed tracing
- Log management
- Synthetic monitoring
- Real user monitoring (RUM)
- Security monitoring
Pricing:
- Infrastructure Essentials: $15/host/month
- Infrastructure Pro: $23/host/month
- APM: $31/host/month
- Log Management: $0.10/GB ingested
- Synthetics API tests: $5/10K runs
For a typical startup (5 hosts + APM + logs):
5 × ($23 + $31) + $50 (logs) = $320/month
New Relic: Consumption-Based Pricing
New Relic moved to a consumption model: you pay for data ingested.
Pricing:
- Free: 100GB/month data, 1 full user
- Core: $0/month + $0.35/GB after 100GB
- Pro: $0.30/GB per month
For a startup with 50GB/day log volume (not unreasonable with 5 services):
50GB/day × 30 days = 1,500 GB/month
1,500 GB × $0.30 = $450/month
New Relic can be cheaper than Datadog if you're careful about what you send, but it requires active management to avoid bill shock.
Grafana Cloud: The Open Source Option
Grafana Cloud offers a generous free tier:
- 10,000 active series (metrics)
- 50GB logs
- 50GB traces
- 14-day retention
Beyond free: $8/1,000 series, $0.50/GB logs. Grafana Cloud is excellent if you have devops expertise to configure Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo. If you don't, the setup complexity is significant.
PandaStack Monitor: What's the Catch?
PandaStack Monitor is genuinely included in the platform pricing. The Starter plan ($12/month) includes:
- Unlimited endpoint checks
- 30-day metric retention
- 30-day log retention
- Slack + email alerts
- Status page
The Pro plan ($29/month) adds:
- 90-day retention
- PagerDuty integration
- Custom webhooks
- Advanced alert policies
- APM traces
What PandaStack Monitor doesn't have:
- Custom Prometheus metrics (yet)
- Distributed tracing across external services (only for PandaStack-hosted apps)
- Security monitoring
- Real user monitoring (browser tracking)
- Network flow analysis
If you need deep APM across a complex microservices architecture spanning multiple cloud providers, Datadog is still the right tool. But for most startups monitoring PandaStack-hosted applications, the built-in tools are more than sufficient.
Realistic Cost Comparison
Scenario: 5-person startup, 3 production services, 1 database, needs uptime monitoring + error alerting + log access.
| Tool | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|
| Datadog (Infrastructure + APM) | $270/month |
| New Relic | ~$150/month (estimated) |
| Grafana Cloud + self-managed | $30/month + setup time |
| Pingdom + Sentry + Logflare | $65/month |
| PandaStack Monitor | $0 (included in $12/month plan) |
Migration from Datadog
If you're already paying for Datadog, here's a simple migration path:
- 1Set up PandaStack Monitor for your PandaStack-hosted services (automatic)
- 2Configure Slack alerts to replace your Datadog alert routing
- 3Set up status pages for external uptime checks
- 4Export historical metrics from Datadog if needed (Datadog supports metric export)
- 5Cancel Datadog when you're confident the coverage is equivalent
Most teams find 90% of their Datadog usage was for the same metrics PandaStack provides built-in.
Conclusion
Unless you're a large engineering organization with complex multi-cloud infrastructure, PandaStack Monitor provides everything you need at a fraction of the cost. At $0 incremental cost (included in your plan), it's the easiest budget win in your infrastructure stack.
[Enable monitoring on PandaStack →](https://dashboard.pandastack.io/monitoring)