Do solo founders really need Datadog?
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Hey everyone,
I’m currently building a small SaaS product, and I started thinking seriously about monitoring.
Most tools (Datadog, New Relic, etc.) feel built for larger teams.
Powerful, yes — but also complex and expensive.
So I’m curious:
• What do you actually monitor in your small or solo SaaS?
• Do you track uptime only?
• Do you track latency?
• Do you rely on logs?
• At what point does monitoring start feeling like overkill?
I’m trying to understand what is truly essential vs. what is just “enterprise noise”.
Not selling anything — just genuinely curious how other indie builders approach this.
Would love to hear your setups.
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My Financé
for most of projects i just have some error handler that sends me a telegram message with a stack trace when something blows up. this approach gets ... surprisingly far. At the previous placed i worked we had {large number} in ARR with the same approach but to a slack channel.
id want to have a really strong business before i considered rolling any of these out personally. when you are small ~everyone can ssh into the server and see the logs directly, ~everyone can dump the entire db and repro the issue, etc.
my 2c:
• What do you actually monitor in your small or solo SaaS? revenue
• Do you track uptime only? i dont track uptime
• Do you track latency? no
• Do you rely on logs? yes
• At what point does monitoring start feeling like overkill? it feels like overkill until there is a whisper of inertia in your product offering.
My Financé
what is your product or your stack?
@catt_marroll appreciate the thoughtful take — makes total sense.
I actually agree that for very small projects, a simple Telegram/Slack error handler + logs can go surprisingly far.
StrixOps is not trying to replace logs or become a full observability suite.
The idea is more about:
- a simple external uptime signal (so you know before users complain)
- clean alerting without noise
- and an instant public status page for credibility
Especially for solo founders who don’t want to wire up multiple pieces themselves.
Stack-wise:
- Backend: lightweight API (Node/Nest)
- Postgres
- External HTTP checks
- Simple alerting layer
- Static status page generation
No agents, no heavy tracing, no log ingestion.
More “focused uptime layer” than full monitoring.
Curious — at what ARR or team size do you personally feel external uptime monitoring becomes necessary?
@catt_marroll External uptime monitoring in under 60 seconds
Trufflow
This is something I'm curious about to but also from the cost perspective. Such as endpoint-level cost attribution where I track cost to the endpoints that are driving it. E.g. AWS/MongoDB tells me what I used but not which endpoints drove the cost. Not having monitoring for it makes cost spikes difficult to figure out.
Not sure how relevant it is for solo developers but it's something I've also been thinking about from a monitoring perspective.
@lienchueh That’s a really interesting angle.
Cost attribution at endpoint level feels like something most solo devs ignore… until a surprise AWS bill hits.
The tricky part is that infra providers show aggregate usage, but not which specific behavior or route is driving it.
I wonder if lightweight request-level metrics (without full-blown tracing) would already solve 80% of that problem.
Have you experimented with any tools that correlate endpoint traffic with cost spikes?
I literally built something like that and launched it last week. It's still in it's early stages.. I'd like to get your thoughts on it.
Very simple and straightforward to use