We tested 25+ monitoring platforms to find the best for infrastructure observability. These tools help you track uptime, performance, and alerts across servers, containers, and cloud resources.
Datadog is the leading observability platform with unified metrics, logs, and traces. Extensive integrations cover every technology. Real-time dashboards and powerful alerting. The premium choice for comprehensive monitoring.
Starting price$15/host/mo
Strengths
Unified platform
750+ integrations
Great dashboards
Strong alerting
Excellent docs
Limitations
Expensive at scale
Complex pricing
Vendor lock-in
Data costs
Who it's for: Best for teams needing comprehensive observability in one platform.
Prometheus and Grafana form the open-source monitoring standard. Prometheus collects and stores metrics with powerful PromQL queries. Grafana provides beautiful, customizable dashboards. Self-hosted with full control.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Free forever
Industry standard
Powerful queries
Extensible
CNCF projects
Limitations
Self-hosted
Multiple tools
Storage management
Setup complexity
Who it's for: Best for teams wanting powerful, free, self-hosted monitoring.
New Relic offers full-stack observability with an industry-leading free tier. 100GB of free data ingestion monthly. Auto-instrumentation makes setup easy. Good balance of power and accessibility.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Generous free tier
Full platform
Easy setup
Good APM
Active development
Limitations
Data costs grow
Some complexity
Feature overlap
Alert learning
Who it's for: Best for teams wanting full observability with a generous free start.
Grafana Cloud provides managed Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo. Open-source compatibility with SaaS convenience. Free tier for smaller deployments. The managed path for Grafana ecosystem users.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Managed service
Open standards
Good free tier
Full stack
Grafana ecosystem
Limitations
Costs at scale
Some limits
Cloud only
Less APM
Who it's for: Best for teams wanting managed Grafana stack without self-hosting.
Dynatrace uses AI for automatic root cause analysis and discovery. OneAgent auto-instruments everything. Davis AI correlates problems across the stack. Enterprise-grade with sophisticated automation.
Starting priceCustom
Strengths
AI-powered
Auto-discovery
Root cause analysis
Enterprise grade
Full stack
Limitations
Expensive
Complex
Sales process
Overkill for small
Who it's for: Best for enterprises wanting AI-driven automated observability.
Zabbix is mature open-source enterprise monitoring. Agent-based and agentless collection. Templates for common infrastructure. Scales to massive deployments. Free with commercial support available.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Enterprise capable
Free
Scalable
Templates
Long history
Limitations
Dated UI
Complex setup
Learning curve
Resource heavy
Who it's for: Best for enterprises wanting free, powerful, self-hosted monitoring.
Uptime Kuma is a self-hosted uptime monitoring tool with a beautiful UI. Simple setup via Docker. Built-in status pages. Perfect for teams wanting basic monitoring without SaaS costs.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Free
Easy setup
Status pages
Clean UI
Docker ready
Limitations
Uptime only
Self-hosted
Basic alerting
Limited scale
Who it's for: Best for small teams needing simple, free uptime monitoring.
Netdata provides real-time per-second metrics with zero configuration. Auto-discovers everything running on a host. Beautiful built-in dashboards. Great for immediate visibility into system performance.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Real-time
Zero config
Auto-discovery
Beautiful UI
Free
Limitations
Metrics only
Storage limits
Less alerting
Cloud costs
Who it's for: Best for teams wanting instant, detailed server performance visibility.
Checkmk monitors hybrid IT infrastructure at scale. Agent-based and SNMP monitoring. Pre-configured rules for common scenarios. Free Raw Edition with enterprise features available.
Starting priceFree
Strengths
Hybrid support
SNMP
Pre-configured
Scalable
Free edition
Limitations
Learning curve
UI dated
Complex config
Enterprise costs
Who it's for: Best for IT teams monitoring traditional and cloud infrastructure together.
Better Uptime combines uptime monitoring with incident management. Automatic status pages and on-call scheduling. Clean, modern interface. Good for teams needing monitoring with incident workflows.
Starting price$20/mo
Strengths
Modern UI
Incident mgmt
Status pages
On-call
Easy setup
Limitations
Uptime focused
No metrics
Costs grow
Limited depth
Who it's for: Best for teams wanting uptime monitoring with incident management.
We tested each monitoring platform in real production environments.
Feature Completeness (25%) — Metrics, logs, traces, and alerting coverage.
Ease of Use (20%) — Setup, configuration, and daily workflow.
Scalability (20%) — Performance with large-scale infrastructure.
Alerting (20%) — Alert rules, routing, and notification options.
Value (15%) — Pricing model and cost at scale.
How to Choose
Choose Datadog if you need full observability platform.
Choose Prometheus + Grafana if you need free self-hosted stack.
Choose New Relic if you need generous free tier.
Choose Grafana Cloud if you need managed Grafana.
Choose Uptime Kuma if you need simple uptime monitoring.
Common Questions
SaaS is easier to start and maintain. Self-hosted gives control and can be cheaper at scale. Consider team skills and data sovereignty requirements. Many use hybrid approaches.
Ranges from free (Prometheus, Uptime Kuma) to expensive (Datadog at scale). Costs typically scale with hosts, metrics volume, and data retention. Budget for 10-20% of infrastructure costs.
Start with RED (Rate, Errors, Duration) for services and USE (Utilization, Saturation, Errors) for resources. Add business metrics that matter. Start simple and expand based on incidents.
Alert on symptoms not causes. Reduce noise with proper thresholds. Route to the right team. Include runbooks. Review and tune regularly. On-call rotation prevents burnout.
