What is Monitoring & Observability?
Monitoring your infrastructure is essential for reliability and performance. Self-hosted monitoring tools like Grafana and Prometheus give you the same observability capabilities as Datadog or New Relic — without the per-host pricing that scales into thousands per month.
Uptime Kuma provides simple uptime monitoring with beautiful status pages. Grafana with Prometheus handles full metrics collection, alerting, and visualization. Netdata gives real-time system monitoring with zero configuration.
A single monitoring VPS can track dozens of servers, containers, and services. You own the data, set your own retention policies, and never worry about per-metric or per-user charges.
$ apt list --installable
Popular Monitoring & Observability Software
Top open-source tools you can self-host on your VPS.
Uptime Kuma
Beautiful self-hosted uptime monitor. Track HTTP, TCP, DNS, and more with notifications via Slack, Discord, Telegram, and email.
Read our guideGrafana
The industry-standard dashboarding platform. Visualize metrics from Prometheus, InfluxDB, Loki, and dozens of other data sources.
Official sitePrometheus
Pull-based metrics collection and alerting system. The foundation of cloud-native monitoring, used by CNCF and major organizations.
Official siteNetdata
Real-time performance monitoring with zero configuration. Beautiful dashboards out of the box, monitoring thousands of metrics per second.
Official siteVPS Specifications
What you need to run monitoring & observability workloads.
$ top --providers --for=monitoring
Best Providers for Monitoring & Observability
Hand-picked based on specs, pricing, and suitability for monitoring & observability workloads.
Hetzner
20TB bandwidth included — perfect for collecting metrics from multiple servers
Get Started
$ man monitoring
Frequently Asked Questions
How much storage does Prometheus need?
Prometheus storage depends on retention period and number of metrics. A typical setup uses 1-2GB per day. 80GB storage covers 1-2 months of metrics for a small to medium infrastructure.
Can Uptime Kuma replace paid monitoring services?
For uptime monitoring, absolutely. Uptime Kuma supports HTTP, TCP, DNS, and Docker monitoring with notifications to Slack, Discord, and email. It lacks advanced APM features of paid services.
Should I run monitoring on the same server?
Ideally, run monitoring on a separate VPS so it stays operational if your main server goes down. A $4/mo VPS is sufficient for Uptime Kuma or basic Grafana.
How does self-hosted monitoring compare to Datadog?
Grafana + Prometheus provides comparable metrics and dashboarding capabilities. Datadog's advantage is ease of setup and APM features. Self-hosted saves 90%+ on costs at medium scale.
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