About MonitoringCost.com
An independent reference for application and infrastructure monitoring tool pricing. Operated by Digital Signet, founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. Built so the budgeting question for Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, Splunk, Grafana Cloud and others can be answered without a vendor demo or a sales call.
The reason this site exists
Monitoring tool pricing is one of the most opaque cost lines in modern engineering budgets. Vendor pricing pages list a per-host or per-GB rate, but real bills depend on log volume, retention, agent count, custom-metric cardinality, and a long list of optional add-ons that compound quickly. Most top-ranking pages are owned by the vendors themselves or by managed-monitoring providers funnelling toward an MSP retainer. This site exists to publish the per-vendor pricing model honestly, surface the architectural multipliers that move a $5k bill to $50k, and provide a calculator that takes operational inputs (log GB/day, retention days, host count, custom metrics) and returns a like-for-like figure across vendors.
Who builds this
Oliver runs Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio that builds data-led pricing and decision tools using public datasets. After 20 years as a solutions architect and tech lead across media, utilities, satellite, and data, he founded Digital Signet to apply autonomous AI development methodology to real software at scale.
Reach Oliver: [email protected]. Profile: LinkedIn.
About Digital Signet, the operator
This site is operated by Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. It is part of a portfolio of consumer cost-reference and calculator sites we run as a live R&D lab for our Signet methodology, an autonomous AI development team that ships real software at scale.
Digital Signet does not sell monitoring software, does not run a managed monitoring or observability practice, does not act as a vendor reseller, and does not accept paid placements from any vendor in the monitoring space. Editorial direction is set by Oliver. Drafts are produced via Digital Signet's autonomous AI development methodology and reviewed against the editorial framework before publication.
For consulting enquiries (fractional CTO, AI product strategy, autonomous-dev-team setup): see digitalsignet.com.
Editorial principles and disclosures
- Source pattern. Built on public reference material across the relevant publisher landscape.
- No paid placements. Does not sell monitoring software, does not run a managed monitoring or observability practice, does not act as a vendor reseller, and does not accept paid placements from any vendor in the monitoring space. Independent of every named third party in the relevant space.
- Math is documented inline. Where the site has a calculator, inputs and assumptions are visible on the calculator page. Nothing is hidden behind opaque scoring.
- Update only when underlying reality changes. Triggers: Major vendor pricing-model change (e.g. per-host to per-GB, or vice versa); New entrant publishing pricing materially below the existing band; Marketplace published price changes greater than 10%; Major monitoring-stack acquisition or product retirement.
Contact
For corrections, methodology questions, or scenarios that don't fit cleanly: [email protected].