| name | devsecops-free-monitoring |
| description | Find free monitoring, logging, APM, and observability tools for DevSecOps |
Skill: DevSecOps Free Monitoring
Goal
Identify free monitoring, logging, APM, and observability services suitable for development and security operations.
Use This Skill When
- Setting up observability on a zero budget
- Comparing free tier monitoring platforms
- Building security monitoring into DevOps workflows
Do Not Use This Skill When
- Enterprise SLA requirements
- Large-scale production monitoring
Inputs
- Monitoring type (metrics, logs, traces, APM)
- Retention requirements
- Alert volume requirements
- Integration needs
Steps
-
Inventory Metrics/Monitoring
-
Prometheus
- Free, open source
- Self-hosted time-series database
- Grafana integration
-
Grafana Cloud
- Free: 10K series, 14-day retention
- Free: 3 users
- Prometheus, Loki, Tempo included
-
Datadog
- Free: 1 host, 1-day retention
- 5 custom metrics
-
New Relic
- Free: 100GB/month ingest
- 1 user free forever
- Full observability stack
-
Signoz
- Free, open source
- Self-hosted APM
- OpenTelemetry based
-
Better Stack
- Free: 3 monitors, 10 checks
- Incident management
-
UptimeRobot
- Free: 50 monitors
- 5-minute intervals
- Status pages
-
Pingdom
- Free: 1 monitor
- Basic uptime checks
-
Healthchecks.io
- Free: 20 checks
- Cron monitoring
-
Inventory Log Management
-
Grafana Loki
- Free, open source
- Self-hosted log aggregation
- Grafana integration
-
Logtail (Better Stack)
- Free: 1GB/month
- SQL-based log queries
-
Papertrail
- Free: 50MB/month, 7-day retention
- 48 hours searchable
-
LogDNA
- Free: 1GB/day, 7-day retention
- Single user
-
Humio
- Free: 16GB/day (single user)
- Self-hosted option
-
Inventory APM
-
Jaeger
- Free, open source
- Distributed tracing
- CNCF project
-
Zipkin
- Free, open source
- Distributed tracing
-
Tempo (Grafana)
- Free, open source
- Cost-effective tracing backend
-
OpenTelemetry Collector
- Free, open source
- Vendor-neutral observability
-
Sentry
- Free: 5K errors/month
- Application error tracking
- Source maps
-
Rollbar
- Free: 5K errors/month
- Error monitoring
-
Inventory Security Monitoring
-
Fail2Ban
- Free, open source
- Intrusion prevention
- Log-based bans
-
Ossec/Wazuh
- Free, open source
- Host-based IDS
- SIEM capabilities
-
Suricata
- Free, open source
- Network IDS/IPS
-
Inventory Incident Management
-
PagerDuty
-
OpsGenie
- Free: 5 users
- Basic incident management
-
Uptime Kuma
- Free, open source
- Self-hosted monitoring
- Status pages
Output
- Monitoring platform comparison
- Retention and volume limits
- Self-hosted vs SaaS recommendations
- Integration patterns for security
Key Considerations
- Grafana Cloud offers excellent free tier
- OpenTelemetry provides vendor neutrality
- Self-hosted eliminates volume limits
- Error tracking free tiers often generous