27 articles tagged with Observability.
Grafana pulls metrics from anywhere, Kibana lives and dies with Elasticsearch. Here's how we pick between them without ending up running both by accident.
New Relic's pricing swings and feature gaps push teams to shop around. Here's a field-tested look at seven alternatives, who each one fits, and how to move.
Your Datadog bill didn't spike because you monitored more. It spiked because containers, custom metrics, and log volume all bill on axes you never think about.
Datadog's bill has a way of tripling the quarter you actually start using it. Here are eight alternatives we've run in production and what each one costs you.
A field guide to the OSS observability stack in 2026, sorted by pillar, with honest notes on where self-hosting pays off and where the ops burden bites.
The metrics stack you self-host is free software plus a real ops bill. Datadog hands you everything and mails you the invoice. Here's how we pick.
One vendor sends the invoice, the other sends the ops work. Here's how we pick between Datadog and the Grafana stack without regretting it later.
Both promise to find your slow query at 3am. One bills by data ingested, the other by host-hour. Here's how that shakes out in a real ops budget.
We ran both across a few hundred services. One wins on auto-instrumentation and root-cause, the other on breadth and time-to-first-dashboard. Here's the split.
We've run both in production for years. Here's the honest split on pricing traps, tracing quality, and which one you actually want for your team size.
Most SLI dashboards track things nobody notices. Here's how we picked the handful of signals that map to real user pain, and dropped the vanity metrics.
The "three pillars" framing misses the point — what matters is correlating across them. The patterns that earn their place and the tooling decisions that pay back.
