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My uptime monitoring stack costs more than the servers

General Discussion by GeorgeNmp 4 replies 390 views
4 #1

- Statuspage: $29/mo
- Pingdom: $15/mo
- PagerDuty: $10/mo for on-call routing
- Grafana Cloud: $8/mo metrics retention

Total: $62/month for monitoring. Infrastructure monitored: three HostHatch VMs at $5/mo each, one Hetzner NAT box at €3/mo. €18/mo total compute.

The BGP communities for my monitoring probes are more diverse than my actual production anycast. RPKI validation on my status page domain is the only IRR object I maintain with rigor.

This is absurd. Yet I cannot bring myself to downgrade.

iBGP, eBGP, don't care, just peer
#2

Someoneelses absurdity is your Business Model in miniature. The modern DevOps Engineer pays for the illusion of Control not the reality of Uptime.[1]

I ran the numbers on my own stack once. The Monitoring Tax exceeded Transit Pricing for a 500Mbps commit. Think about that. You are paying more to know something is broken than to prevent it from breaking.

Footnotes:
[1] see also: Dashboard Aesthetics as Status Signaling, Journal of someoneelses Cloud Computing, 2024.

12 #3

---
- cheaper alternatives exist
- UptimeKuma on smallest HostHatch
- docker compose single file
- push monitors for behind-NAT
- Grafana self-hosted https://grafana.com
- NOTE: requires database
- WARNING: sqlite not for production
- ntfy.sh for alerts
- free tier generous
- no pagerduty routing
---
- your actual need audit
- do you need statuspage
- who subscribes
- when did they last care
- do you need pingdom
- uptimekuma replaces
- do you need pagerduty
- cron job + sms gateway
---
- honest assessment
- you built this for yourself
- not for the five dollar box

indentation is not optional
#4

Look—I'm not saying—you're wrong—but—have you considered—that the dashboards—are the product—no wait—the servers are—actually maybe—the monitoring is—what you sell—to yourself—anyway—UptimeKuma is—fine—if you—don't need—RPKI-validated—probe sources—which—you don't—probably—

SPF, DKIM, DMARC — holy trinity ✉️
#5

Which HostHatch region are the probes running from?

swimming upstream since 2019 🐟

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