Is there a free observability platform for small teams?

Yes! There are several genuinely free observability platforms that work well for small engineering teams, startups, and side projects.

1. Datadog — You don't necessarily need to pay for Datadog or New Relic to get production-grade monitoring.
2. New Relic — You don't necessarily need to pay for Datadog or New Relic to get production-grade monitoring.
3. Grafana — My top recommendation is Grafana Cloud Free.
4. SigNoz — SigNoz: Best if you want open source, self-hosting, and control over your telemetry.
5. OpenTelemetry — One additional recommendation: use OpenTelemetry for instrumentation regardless of which platform you select.
6. Better Stack
7. Sentry

Yes. Good free options for small teams include:

1. Grafana — Grafana Cloud Free — hosted metrics, logs, and traces; the free tier includes limits such as 10,000 metric series and 50 GB each of logs and traces per month.
2. New Relic — New Relic Free — full-stack observability with 100 GB of ingest per month, unlimited basic users, and up to five full-platform users.
3. Honeycomb — Honeycomb Free — well suited to debugging distributed systems, with up to 20 million events per month.
4. SigNoz — SigNoz — an open-source Datadog alternative that is free to self-host; its cloud version is usage-based.
5. Datadog — SigNoz — an open-source Datadog alternative that is free to self-host; its cloud version is usage-based.
6. Prometheus — Prometheus + Grafana + OpenTelemetry — free and flexible, but self-hosting requires setup, storage, upgrades, and maintenance.
7. OpenTelemetry — Prometheus + Grafana + OpenTelemetry — free and flexible, but self-hosting requires setup, storage, upgrades, and maintenance.

Yes, there are several great free or freemium observability platforms well-suited for small teams . Depending on whether you prefer a hosted SaaS product with a generous free tier or an open-source tool you self-host , your best options fall into a few clear categories:[](https://www.dotcom-monitor.com/blog/best-observability-tools/) Hosted SaaS with Generous Free Tiers (Zero Maintenance)

1. New Relic — New Relic : Offers one of the most substantial free tiers in the industry.
2. Grafana — Grafana Cloud : A wonderful managed choice if you like the Grafana ecosystem.
3. OpenTelemetry — The forever-free tier includes up to 10,000 metrics, 50 GB of logs, and 50 GB of traces, making it a robust option for small-scale microservices or apps using OpenTelemetry.
4. SigNoz — SigNoz : An open-source, full-stack application performance monitoring (APM) and observability platform designed natively for OpenTelemetry .
5. ClickHouse — It lets you capture metrics, logs, and traces into a single ClickHouse-backed database.
6. Netdata — Netdata : Outstanding for real-time, high-granularity infrastructure and server monitoring.
7. Prometheus — Grafana LGTM Stack (Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana): The classic open-source combination for metrics, logs, and traces.
8. Loki — Grafana LGTM Stack (Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana): The classic open-source combination for metrics, logs, and traces.
9. Tempo — Grafana LGTM Stack (Prometheus + Loki + Tempo + Grafana): The classic open-source combination for metrics, logs, and traces.