The Economics of Self-Hosting vs. Managed Monitoring

The article compares managed monitoring platforms with self-hosted observability stacks on total cost, not just license price.

Managed tools like Datadog, New Relic, and Dynatrace usually make more sense for smaller teams because they reduce engineering and ops burden.

Self-hosting with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki can become cheaper at larger scale, but only if teams can absorb maintenance, scaling, and reliability work.

A hybrid setup is often the best fit, especially when break-even depends on data volume, cardinality, log retention, and compliance needs like SOC2 or HIPAA.