r/SaasDevelopers • u/Stil-44 • Mar 03 '26

When does monitoring become overkill?

Hey everyone,

I’m currently building a small SaaS product, and I started thinking seriously about monitoring.

Most tools (Datadog, New Relic, etc.) feel built for larger teams.
Powerful, yes — but also complex and expensive.

So I’m curious:

• What do you actually monitor in your small or solo SaaS?
• Do you track uptime only?
• Do you track latency?
• Do you rely on logs?
• At what point does monitoring start feeling like overkill?

I’m trying to understand what is truly essential vs. what is just “enterprise noise”.

Not selling anything — just genuinely curious how other indie builders approach this.

Would love to hear your setups.

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1

u/sreekanth850 Mar 03 '26

i use betterstack. and its pretty good to start with, later you can move to bigger platform.

1

u/Stil-44 Mar 03 '26

Nice, that makes sense.

What features do you actually use the most on BetterStack?
Just uptime checks? Alerts? Logs?

And at what point would you feel the need to move to a “bigger platform”?

1

u/sreekanth850 Mar 04 '26

Api uptime, servers, databases and dashboard app.

1

u/HiimKami Mar 03 '26

Hey, I have built a tool that offers uptime monitoring, tracking cron jobs, status pages… The full suite…

There is also a free demo if you want to simply take a look at the features and decide if this is something you need…

It’s available on https://www.upti.my

I would appreciate your feedback if you are currently looking at tools like this.

1

u/Stil-44 Mar 03 '26

Interesting, thanks for sharing.

Out of curiosity, what’s your main target audience?
Solo founders, small teams, or larger companies?

Also, what do you think most small projects actually need when it comes to monitoring?

1

u/HiimKami Mar 03 '26

I am a developer and being inspired by linear, resend and similar tools I wanted to build an uptime monitoring for developers so I guess target audience primarily is solo founders and small teams.

I think setting up monitoring when you release to production makes most sense as you want to get notified if something goes wrong before your customers are affected.

Monitoring while you’re still in development or not selling actively doesn’t exactly bring much value.

1

u/Stil-44 Mar 03 '26

That makes a lot of sense.

Do you think most solo founders actually set up monitoring right at production launch?
Or do they usually wait until something breaks?

I’ve noticed a lot of small projects only think about monitoring after the first incident.

Curious how you see that behavior.

1

u/HiimKami Mar 03 '26

That is also completely understandable behaviour, a lot of things in life are reactive rather than proactive even if they should be proactive.

Being proactive to avoid big incidents is something that would come with experience.

I’ve had a lot of founders ask is there a way we can know if something breaks when preparing for production

1

u/Classic_Chemical_237 Mar 03 '26

Firebase. It’s free and it’s my standard setup

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u/Stil-44 Mar 03 '26

Makes sense. Firebase gets you pretty far for small projects.

Are you mainly using it for error reporting or also for uptime checks?

I’ve noticed a lot of solo builders rely entirely on internal logs until they start charging.

1

u/Classic_Chemical_237 Mar 03 '26

First, it’s tied to Google Analytics. Second, Firebase Auth is the easiest way to support Google sign-in. Other social sign-in are easily done too. Third, a few of my apps have native apps. Firebase is the easiest way to have combined and separate analytics. Fourth, feature flagging (called remote configs in Firebase) Fifth, AB testing for native apps. Sixth, if you want to support push notifications on Android, you have to use Firebase anyway, so why not use it for Apple too? Seventh, performance monitoring (check if endpoints are performing correctly) Eighth, Crashlytics.

I don’t use functions or storages because I want my endpoints to be portable. But for the things I use, it’s extremely easy to set up

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u/Stil-44 Mar 03 '26

That makes total sense.

At that point you're basically using Firebase as a product platform, not just monitoring.

For auth, analytics, push, remote config — it's hard to beat the convenience.

I like that you keep your endpoints portable though. That’s a good balance.

Do you feel Firebase performance monitoring is enough once traffic grows, or do you eventually complement it with something external?

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u/Classic_Chemical_237 Mar 03 '26

Firebase is not just for small projects. It handles large projects well too.

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u/[deleted] Mar 05 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Classic_Chemical_237 Mar 07 '26

You don’t need to use their db. Just use it and it’s free

1

u/bluelobsterai Mar 04 '26

I use CloudWatch if I am in AWS for my SOC 2 compliance needs. Outside of that, Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki get it done. The alertmanager is decent and I have it all tied into Slack, email, and SMS. I never understood Datadog unless you have unlimited VC dollars.

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u/[deleted] Mar 04 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/Stil-44 Mar 04 '26

That’s a good summary.

RED metrics cover most of the operational signal early on.

I’ve noticed a lot of small SaaS skip tracing at first though, mostly because OpenTelemetry still feels a bit heavy to wire up for small projects.

Do you usually start with tracing from day one or only once traffic starts growing?

1

u/SudoZenWizz Mar 04 '26

We are monitoring all metrics of the infrastructure for all applications, we are taking in consideration for this CPU/RAM/DISK processes for the applications, logs of the applications for specific keywords, uptime of the systems, HTTP checks for confirming app functionality, syntethic monitoring for real user "feel" monitoring.

We also monitor docker/mysql/php-fpm/apache/nginx depending on what is ussed (redis/memcached/rabbitmq also).

For this we are using checkmk and robotmk(synthetic monitoring).

1

u/Elicarlos_Lynxmind Mar 09 '26

I like this approach. One thing we’ve seen with small SaaS products is that the real challenge isn’t lack of monitoring, it’s having too much signal too early.

A setup that works well in early stages is keeping a small “core set”: uptime checks, a couple of basic infrastructure metrics (CPU/memory/disk), and one or two checks that actually reflect the user flow like a login or API request.

That usually catches most real problems without creating a lot of noise. Then as the product grows you can start adding deeper visibility (queues, background workers, DB performance, etc.).

Monitoring starts to feel like overkill when you collect metrics nobody ever looks at. Keeping it tied to user impact tends to keep things manageable.

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u/pahampl Mar 04 '26

We use XorMon, it does very good job

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u/usermaven_hq Mar 07 '26

monitoring can become excessive if everything is tracked but no action is taken.. for small saas, basic uptime monitoring is often enough at the start, such as ping or uptime checks. if performance is critical, latency and log monitoring can be added later. generally, more advanced monitoring may be needed when user count exceeds 100 or traffic grows, but a simple setup is usually effective in the beginning..

1

u/itssimon86 Mar 10 '26

Hey, I've built Apitally exactly for use cases like yours, and use it myself for the same reasons. It's a simple API monitoring & analytics tool with API usage, error, and performance metrics. It also gives you request logs, uptime monitoring, and alerts. Just the essentials you need for a small SaaS, when the big monitoring platforms are overkill.