Cost-Effective Observability: The 80/20 Stack for Startups

You Don't Need Datadog (Yet) I see startups spending $5,000/month on Datadog with 8 engineers. That's $625 per engineer per month for monitoring. At that stage, you need that money for product development. Here's the observability stack that costs under $200/month and covers 80% of what you need. The Stack Metrics: Prometheus + Grafana (free, self-hosted on K8s) Logs: Loki (free, self-hosted) or CloudWatch ($) Tracing: OpenTelemetry → Jaeger (free, self-hosted) Alerting: Alertmanager → PagerDuty