What to Monitor
Errors: exceptions in code.
Performance: response times, throughput.
Infrastructure: CPU, memory, disk.
Business: signups, revenue, activation.
User experience: real user monitoring.
Sentry – Error Tracking
Best in class for errors.
Real-time alerts.
Stack traces with source maps.
User impact tracking.
Cost: $26/mo starter, scales with events.
DataDog – All-in-One
Full observability platform.
Metrics, logs, traces in one place.
Powerful dashboards.
Expensive at scale.
Cost: $15-31/host/month + logs, APM.
Grafana – Open Source
Visualization for metrics.
Combines with Prometheus, Loki, Tempo.
Self-hosted or cloud.
Cheaper long-term, more setup.
Cost: free self-host, $8/mo cloud starter.
New Relic
APM focus.
Full stack observability.
Better than DataDog for some use cases.
Similar pricing model.
Elastic Stack
ELK: Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana.
Powerful for logs and search.
Self-hosted or cloud.
Complex to run at scale.
Uptime Monitoring
Basic requirement: is site up?
Tools: UptimeRobot (free), Pingdom, Better Uptime.
Multi-region checks.
Alert routing (Slack, PagerDuty).
Real User Monitoring (RUM)
Track actual user experience.
Page load times per user.
Core Web Vitals.
Tools: DataDog RUM, Sentry Performance, LogRocket.
Session Replay
Watch user sessions.
Debug UX issues.
See errors in context.
Tools: LogRocket, FullStory, Sentry Session Replay.
Log Management
Centralized logs.
Search and analyze.
Tools: DataDog Logs, LogTail, Papertrail.
Cost scales with volume.
Alerting Strategy
Not everything is alertable.
Only actionable alerts.
Severity levels.
On-call rotation.
Runbooks for common issues.
What Metrics Matter
Response time percentiles: p50, p95, p99.
Error rate: percentage of failed requests.
Throughput: requests per second.
Saturation: how full is capacity.
Business metrics tied to reliability.
Cost Considerations
Free tiers usually adequate for MVP.
Costs grow with traffic and data.
Sample high-volume events.
Retention: how long to keep data.
Our Recommendation
MVP: Sentry (errors) + UptimeRobot (uptime).
Growing: add DataDog or Grafana Cloud.
Scale: full stack (DataDog or Grafana + Prometheus).
Enterprise: everything above.
Implementation Tips
Start with essentials.
Add gradually as needed.
Don’t try to monitor everything from day 1.
Iterate based on incidents.
Document your setup.
Based on Real Projects
This guide is based on our work with:
Further Reading
If this guide helped you, you might also want to read our comprehensive guide on Custom SaaS Development.
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