Self-hosting a full monitoring stack in one command: servers, logs, APM and status pages
Teams self-host monitoring for two reasons: the data cannot leave the building, or the SaaS bill grew faster than the fleet. The catch is that "self-hosted monitoring" usually means five services. This post is about what those five are, what running them really costs, and how to collapse them into one install. The usual stack and what each piece costs you Need Common choice What you maintain Host…
Self-hosted monitoring systems typically require five different services: metrics, logs, traces, uptime monitoring, and a status page. This article explains those components, their costs, and how they can be consolidated into a single installation. The common choices are Prometheus for metrics, Grafana and Alertmanager for dashboards and alerts, Loki for logs, and Uptime Kuma for uptime and status pages.
Together, these tools take roughly a day to set up properly, an afternoon each month for maintenance, and one incident every quarter when a disk fills or an upgrade breaks a config.
Installing all five services separately requires significant effort, especially for small teams. Vigil, a self-hosted version, simplifies this process with a single command. It installs Docker if needed, downloads the release bundle and verifies its signature, sets up HTTPS with Caddy and Let's Encrypt, and deploys PostgreSQL, a worker, and two web replicas behind Caddy's load balancer.
Two replicas ensure updates can proceed without downtime. The installer also creates cron jobs for regular backup and offline operation on private networks. Licences are verified locally, so the instance runs without any outbound connections.
A typical deployment with 20 servers and logging enabled grows the database by about 2 GB per month. The primary use case for this consolidated install is when teams want monitoring as a service they own rather than one they need to run. This approach is particularly beneficial for platforms or when high-cardinality traces are required. For teams already comfortable with Prometheus and enjoying existing dashboards, maintaining the full stack may still be the preferred option.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
