I'm curious to hear from DevOps engineers about the costs associated with your current network monitoring setups. Specifically, what tools are you using, like Grafana, Datadog, Prometheus, or CloudWatch, and what limitations have you noticed in their capabilities?
3 Answers
We're currently using a checkmk setup, monitoring around 50,000 services. We pay for an enterprise subscription each year, but there's also a free community edition available, albeit it's not as efficient.
Honestly, I've set up a minimal network monitoring system for virtually nothing. I just have a small VPS that checks the health of my production and staging environments every minute. If everything's good, it just sends a 204 no content response. If there’s an issue, I get alerted via email to SMS. It replaced the exorbitant costs of Datadog synthetics, which we weren't really utilizing.
At my workplace, we use Datadog, and let me tell you, it costs a fortune! It's definitely on the pricier side compared to other options.
Yeah, I've heard that Datadog can really rack up the bills.

I think the community edition is a solid option for smaller setups!