[katabatic]

Datadog will cost you $165,600 a year for 600 hosts. That is objectively equal to a very well paid engineer. So no, the statement is not untrue.

(I picked 600 because that was the approximate number of machines we had at my last job, where we used Graphite maintained by one guy, part time).

You included a LOT of redundancy in your OSS list. Multiple timeseries databases. Multiple collection daemons. Multiple dashboards. Multiple alerting systems (Who in their right mind would use Nagios AND Icinga?). You're effectively arguing about maintaining multiple monitoring stacks, some of which are quited aged.

[technofiend]

Yikes. I'm sure there's discount pricing available but some of us have tens of thousands of hosts to monitor. The pricing you quoted doesn't scale. For me it might be cheaper to collect with OSS and graph with SaaS.

[user5994461]

Indeed, I gave a list of all the tools, you only need to make a stack of about 4 to 8 of them to get the job done.

Let's say statsd + collectd (metrics collection) + graphite (aggregation) + carbon/whisper (graphite storage) + icinga (alerting) + grafana (graphing). That doesn't exactly come easy.

No offense but a single graphite is not a monitoring solution. It's just the tip of the iceberg. Monitoring does take a lot of engineering work and a lot of maintenance. You won't get away operating 600 hosts on the cheap, just think about how much are the hosts themselves.

[foobarian]

Let's talk about how much Amazon will charge you for 600 instances a year...