Observability on $5 self-host stack
5 open-source picks · replaces 5 SaaS · self-host on your own VPS
Persona. Solo or small-team operator who wants uptime checks + dashboards + analytics + status page + paging — and refuses to budget Datadog money for it.
Why these together
The premise: get usable monitoring + analytics + paging without paying Datadog. Uptime Kuma is the cheapest credible uptime checker (one container, $0 marginal cost when colocated with anything else); Grafana is the dashboard layer that reads from any timeseries store you bring (Prometheus on the same box is the typical pairing); Plausible is the lightweight web-analytics piece, separate from product/error data so the cookie-free promise to users stays clean; Cachet is the public status page that Uptime Kuma pings; Keep is the on-call rotation that closes the loop when something flips red. The honest disclaimer: $5 is enough for Uptime Kuma + Plausible + Cachet on one VPS. Adding Grafana + Prometheus + Keep usually pushes you to $15-20. Still ~10× cheaper than Datadog at any non-trivial scale.
The 5 picks
| Pick | Replaces | Cost / setup | Health |
|---|---|---|---|
| louislam/uptime-kuma · MIT | UptimeRobot External uptime / availability monitoring | $3/mo+ easy · 5min docker run | alive |
| grafana/grafana · AGPL-3.0 | Datadog Observability (metrics + logs + traces + APM) | $20/mo+ hard · 1-2h to wire up the LGTM stack via docker-compose; multi-day to do it production-grade | alive |
| plausible/analytics · AGPL-3.0 | Google Analytics Web analytics | $5/mo+ easy · 10min docker-compose | alive |
| cachethq/cachet · MIT | Statuspage (Atlassian) Public status page / incident communication | $5/mo+ moderate · 20min docker-compose (PHP/Laravel + Postgres or MySQL) | alive |
| keephq/keep · MIT | PagerDuty On-call rotation / incident response / paging | $10/mo+ moderate · 30min docker-compose (keep-frontend + keep-backend + websocket-server; SQLite default, swap to Postgres via `DATABASE_CONNECTION_STRING`) | alive |
Other stacks
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- Remote team self-host stack · 5 picks
- Customer support team self-host stack · 4 picks
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- Marketing team self-host stack · 5 picks
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