monitoring
Better Stack
Observability + uptime + incident management in one — modern alternative to Datadog
Unified monitoring platform: uptime monitors, incident management + on-call, logs/traces/metrics (formerly Logtail), session replay, status pages, error tracking.
Pricing
| Tier | Price | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go | Free | Ingest $0.15/GB, retention $0.08/GB/month. Metrics $0.75/GB/month. |
| Free | Free | 10 monitors + heartbeats, 1 status page. 3GB logs @ 3-day retention. 30GB metrics. 100K exceptions/mo. 5k session replays. |
| Telemetry — Nano | $30/mo | $30/mo ($25 annual). 40 GB logs/traces/metrics. 30-day retention. |
| Responder License | $34/mo | $34/mo ($29 annual) per responder. Unlimited phone + SMS alerts. Required for on-call. |
| Telemetry — Micro | $120/mo | $120/mo. 160 GB. |
| Telemetry — Mega | $250/mo | $250/mo. 340 GB. |
| Telemetry — Tera | $500/mo | $500/mo. 700 GB. |
Limits
| Tier | Metric | Value | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| — | call routing | $250/mo ($208 annual) | Automated phone routing |
| — | error tracking rate | $0.000075 per exception | Error tracking |
| — | extra heartbeats 10 | $20/mo ($17 annual) per 10 | Additional heartbeats |
| — | extra monitors 50 | $25/mo ($21 annual) per 50 | Additional monitors |
| — | extra status page | $15/mo ($12 annual) | Additional status page |
| — | ingest rate | $0.15/GB (monthly), $0.10/GB (annual) | Log+trace ingest |
| — | metrics rate | $0.75/GB/month | Metrics retention |
| — | retention rate | $0.08/GB/month | Retention pricing |
| — | session replay rate | $0.00225 per replay | Session replay |
Features
- Dashboards — SQL + chart-based dashboards.
- Distributed Tracing — OpenTelemetry traces with span analysis.
- Error Tracking — Sentry-style error capture per $0.000075/exception.
- Heartbeats (Cron) — Dead-man-switch style alerts for cron/scheduled jobs.
- Logs (formerly Logtail) — Centralized structured logging with live tail + SQL.
- Metrics — Prometheus-compatible metrics ingest + visualization.
- On-Call & Incidents — Schedules, escalations, incident response with postmortems.
- Phone + SMS Alerts — Unlimited phone + SMS on Responder license.
- Reporting & Analytics — +$5/member/month add-on.
- Session Replay — Integrated with error events.
- SQL Queries over Logs — ClickHouse-backed SQL on all ingested telemetry.
- Status Pages — Hosted status pages with custom domain + brandable.
- Uptime Monitoring — HTTP, keyword, ping, TCP, UDP monitors. Global checkpoints.
Developer interfaces
| Slug | Name | Kind | Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| rest-api | Better Stack REST API | rest | v2 |
| sdk-ruby | logtail-ruby | sdk | 0.x |
| otlp | OTLP (OpenTelemetry) | other | — |
| sdk-node | pino-logtail / winston transport | sdk | 0.x |
| sdk-python | python-logtail | sdk | 0.x |
| telemetry-api | Telemetry API | rest | v1 |
| webhooks | Webhooks | other | — |
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Staxly is an independent catalog of developer platforms. Outbound links to Better Stack are plain references to their official pages. Pricing is verified at publication time — reconfirm on the vendor site before buying.