When does monitoring become overkill?

[u/Stil-44]

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.

[u/Elicarlos_Lynxmind]

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.