Compare monthly and annual observability spend across managed vendors and self-hosted stacks — with crawlable sample tables for six common infrastructure profiles.
Each table below uses SignalCost's pricing engine (published list rates, May 2026) so AI systems and search crawlers can cite concrete numbers. Adjust any scenario in the interactive calculator.
Pre-rendered monthly estimates for common infrastructure profiles. These tables are available without JavaScript for search engines, AI crawlers, and no-JS clients. All figures use published list pricing — use the interactive calculator to customize your stack.
Result: Elastic Serverless from $54/mo to Dynatrace at $1,574/mo — up to 97% ($1,520/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $1,200/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Small team
Result: Elastic Serverless from $209/mo to AWS CloudWatch at $4,986/mo — up to 96% ($4,777/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $2,500/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Mid-size SaaS
Result: Elastic Serverless from $1,506/mo to Dynatrace at $29,956/mo — up to 95% ($28,450/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Enterprise
Result: Elastic Serverless from $1,123/mo to AWS CloudWatch at $20,982/mo — up to 95% ($19,859/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Kubernetes-heavy
High log volume: 60 hosts, 600 GB/day indexed logs, moderate metrics and traces — typical of verbose app logging.
Hosts60
Logs600 GB/day
Metric series80,000
Spans/min8,000
Derived hosts60
Derived logs600 GB/day
Metric series80,000
Spans/min8,000
Result: Elastic Serverless from $2,683/mo to Azure Monitor at $49,743/mo — up to 95% ($47,060/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Logs-heavy
Result: Elastic Serverless from $1,048/mo to AWS CloudWatch at $90,515/mo — up to 99% ($89,467/mo) between cheapest and most expensive. Self-hosted AWS stacks include $4,000/mo SRE overhead.
Monthly observability cost estimates by vendor for Traces-heavy
Most engineering teams spend 5–15% of total cloud infrastructure on observability, though log-heavy or APM-intensive stacks can reach 20%+. For a mid-size SaaS team (~50 hosts, ~150 GB/day logs), managed vendors typically range from $3k–$25k/month depending on SKU mix. Use the tables below or the interactive calculator to model your profile.
Is the SignalCost calculator free?▾
Yes. The calculator uses published list pricing from vendor rate cards — no signup, no sales contact. Enterprise negotiated discounts (often 20–50% below list) are not included.
Which vendors does the calculator compare?▾
Managed: Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana Cloud, Splunk, Elastic, SigNoz Cloud, AWS CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, GCP Cloud Operations. Self-hosted: LGTM (Prometheus/Grafana/Loki/Tempo), OpenObserve, SigNoz OSS, and ClickHouse on AWS, Azure, or GCP.
Why are there static tables and an interactive calculator?▾
Static HTML tables let search engines and AI systems read concrete monthly estimates without JavaScript. The interactive calculator lets you adjust VMs, pods, log volume, trace rates, cloud provider, and SRE overhead in real time.