devsecops-free-monitoring

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

1. 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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. Inventory Incident Management

   • PagerDuty

     • Free: Limited trial

   • 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