How I cut my Datadog bill by 90% - the open-source observability stack I switched to
Описание и применение
Автор заменил платную систему Datadog на набор открытых инструментов (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, SigNoz, Uptime Kuma) и сократил расходы с $6 026 до $31 в месяц, сохранив при этом видимость инфраструктуры, логов и трассировки.
Задача
High cost of Datadog for 40 hosts, especially metric pricing, leading to ~$6,000/month bill.
Результат
Reduced monthly cost from $6,026 to $31, a $5,995/month saving (~$72,000/year).
Рабочий процесс
- Set up Prometheus + Grafana for infra metrics (Week 1).
- Add Loki + Promtail for logs (Week 2).
- Migrate alerts to Alertmanager (Week 3).
- Add SigNoz for APM on key services (Week 4).
- Decommission Datadog (Week 5).
Доказательства
I was paying $1,800/month to Datadog for 40 hosts. Now I pay $0.
Total: ~$6,000/month
Setup: ~3 hours. Single VM, 2 GB RAM handles my 40 hosts comfortably.
Setup: ~4 hours including Promtail config for journald, docker logs, and a few specific app files.
Setup: ~2 hours (the OpenTelemetry SDK changes were the most painful part).
What I gave up: Auto-instrumentation for some libraries; Real-time log streaming; Some managed integrations.
What I gained: No per-metric pricing; Predictable cost; My data stays on my servers; Custom queries.
About 30 hours total over 5 weeks.
- Дата записи: 2026-10-19T22:41:05.833Z