All 100 ideasServers and DevOps
#99 of 100 · Servers and DevOps
Logs and metrics on a budget
A free or cheap, self-hostable Datadog, Splunk or Sentry substitute that is simple enough for a few servers or a side project.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private29%
- Object to subscriptions14%
- Want it open source or self-hosted50%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 14 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Built, still asked for36 Show HN launches do this job, and 22 more do part of it. People still ask, so the launches are missed, unknown, or not what they want. Ask what they’re missing before you build.
- HyperDX – open-source dev-friendly Datadog alternative2023 · 722 pts
- SigNoz – open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic2022 · 510 pts
- ClickStack – Open-source Datadog alternative by ClickHouse and HyperDX2025 · 241 pts
- OneUptime – open-source Datadog Alternative2024 · 233 pts
- OpenObserve – Elasticsearch/Datadog alternative2023 · 198 pts
- Coroot – eBPF-based, open source observability with actionable insights2025 · 162 pts
- Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog2024 · 145 pts
- Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min2026 · 90 pts
Instead of: Datadog, Splunk, Sentry, New Relic
The idea, as matched
A cheap or free, easy-to-set-up alternative to Datadog, Splunk or Sentry for collecting, searching and alerting on logs, metrics and errors, self-hostable and pleasant to use at small scale.
Jev first matched 24 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 14 of 24.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Small-scale and hobby use dominate.
- Sep 2024Wants a good-looking drop-in self-hosted replacement for Datadog. Read it: a comment in “Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?”
- Oct 2022Wants a decent Splunk alternative for non-enterprise side projects. Read it: a comment in “Splunk IP suit against Cribl”
- Sep 2022Wants a lighter alternative to Sentry, which uses a lot of resources. Read it: a comment in “Show HN: Open-source APM with support for tracing, metrics, and logs”
- Oct 2020Wants a tool for small amounts of manual debug logs, shown as an event-flow list or graph. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Best Tools for Log Management?”
- Jul 2020Wants simple centralized logging for small projects, where scripts can POST logs, without a full Graylog setup. Read it: a comment in “Good Logging”
- May 2020Wants a simple self-hostable performance monitoring tool with an API to store custom measurements and a dashboard. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Recommendations for simple performance monitoring infrastructure”
- Dec 2019Wants a good free monitoring and observability platform for a personal project. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: What is the best free Monitoring and Observability platform”
- Aug 2019Wants a credible, cheaper Splunk alternative with strong queries and dashboards. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Splunk Alternatives?”
- Dec 2016Asks for an open-source alternative to Rollbar. Read it: a comment in “Stack on a Budget – A collection of services with great free tiers”
- Jul 2013Wants a friendlier, self-hosted, free network monitoring tool less intimidating than Nagios. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Alternatives for high end network monitoring”
- Jun 2012Wants a decent fully free and open-source Splunk-like logging solution that communities can improve. Read it: a comment in “Central Logging with Open Source Software”
- Jun 2012Asks for a company offering logging through an API. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Web logging tools?”
- Nov 2011Wants an easy-to-integrate tool for collecting performance metrics like API response times, replacing Cacti. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Best tool to collect performance metrics”
- Aug 2011Wants a monitoring tool for VPS metrics like CPU, disk, nginx response times and MongoDB load. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: What do you use for monitoring your servers?”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.