Sample cost comparisons (static tables)
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.
Kubernetes-heavy
Cloud-native platform: 5 K8s clusters, 150 pods per cluster, 80 microservices, minimal bare-metal VMs.
VMs5
K8s clusters5
Pods / cluster150
Services80
Derived hosts30
Derived logs240 GB/day
Metric series116,500
Spans/min16,000
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| Vendor / stack | Type | Monthly | Annual | vs cheapest |
|---|
| Elastic Serverless(cheapest) | Managed | $1,123 | $13,476 | — |
| Elastic Cloud (Hosted) | Managed | $3,930 | $47,160 | +$2,807 (+250%) |
| SigNoz Cloud | Managed | $4,279 | $51,348 | +$3,156 (+281%) |
| New Relic | Managed | $4,894 | $58,728 | +$3,771 (+336%) |
| O2 on AWS | Self-hosted | $4,897 | $58,764 | +$3,774 (+336%) |
| GCP Cloud Operations | Cloud-native | $4,922 | $59,064 | +$3,799 (+338%) |
| Grafana Cloud | Managed | $5,083 | $60,996 | +$3,960 (+353%) |
| ClickHouse on AWS | Self-hosted | $6,262 | $75,144 | +$5,139 (+458%) |
| SigNoz on AWS | Self-hosted | $6,549 | $78,588 | +$5,426 (+483%) |
| LGTM on AWS | Self-hosted | $6,650 | $79,800 | +$5,527 (+492%) |
| Splunk (Cisco) | Managed | $16,500 | $198,000 | +$15,377 (+1369%) |
| Dynatrace | Managed | $19,344 | $232,128 | +$18,221 (+1623%) |
| Datadog | Managed | $20,340 | $244,080 | +$19,217 (+1711%) |
| Azure Monitor | Cloud-native | $20,412 | $244,944 | +$19,289 (+1718%) |
| AWS CloudWatch | Cloud-native | $20,982 | $251,784 | +$19,859 (+1768%) |
List pricing as of May 2026. Adjust inputs in the calculator →
Traces-heavy
APM-intensive microservices: 80 hosts, 120 GB/day logs, 400k metric series, 250k spans/min — deep distributed tracing.
Hosts80
Logs120 GB/day
Metric series400,000
Spans/min250,000
Derived hosts80
Derived logs120 GB/day
Metric series400,000
Spans/min250,000
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| Vendor / stack | Type | Monthly | Annual | vs cheapest |
|---|
| Elastic Serverless(cheapest) | Managed | $1,048 | $12,576 | — |
| Elastic Cloud (Hosted) | Managed | $3,667 | $44,004 | +$2,619 (+250%) |
| O2 on AWS | Self-hosted | $5,045 | $60,540 | +$3,997 (+381%) |
| ClickHouse on AWS | Self-hosted | $5,676 | $68,112 | +$4,628 (+442%) |
| New Relic | Managed | $5,977 | $71,724 | +$4,929 (+470%) |
| SigNoz on AWS | Self-hosted | $6,553 | $78,636 | +$5,505 (+525%) |
| LGTM on AWS | Self-hosted | $6,647 | $79,764 | +$5,599 (+534%) |
| Grafana Cloud | Managed | $7,331 | $87,972 | +$6,283 (+600%) |
| GCP Cloud Operations | Cloud-native | $8,087 | $97,044 | +$7,039 (+672%) |
| SigNoz Cloud | Managed | $9,620 | $115,440 | +$8,572 (+818%) |
| Splunk (Cisco) | Managed | $12,800 | $153,600 | +$11,752 (+1121%) |
| Dynatrace | Managed | $17,264 | $207,168 | +$16,216 (+1547%) |
| Azure Monitor | Cloud-native | $24,426 | $293,112 | +$23,378 (+2231%) |
| Datadog | Managed | $33,672 | $404,064 | +$32,624 (+3113%) |
| AWS CloudWatch | Cloud-native | $90,515 | $1,086,180 | +$89,467 (+8537%) |
List pricing as of May 2026. Adjust inputs in the calculator →