Why Simple Monitoring Beats Complex Dashboards
You don't need 50 integrations and a wall of charts to know your site is up. A case for keeping monitoring simple.
The monitoring tool trap
Every monitoring tool wants to be a platform. What starts as "is my site up?" turns into dashboards, integrations, escalation policies, runbooks, and a pricing page with four tiers.
Most of that exists because enterprise customers demand it, and enterprise customers pay the bills. If you're a solo dev or a small team, you're paying for — or at least navigating around — complexity you'll never touch.
Complexity costs you
Every feature is a decision. Slack integration? Set up a webhook. SMS alerts? Add a phone number, configure escalation rules. Multiple check locations? Pick which regions matter.
None of it is hard. But it's all friction, and friction means one more thing to misconfigure. Most of these setups sit half-finished because you got busy and the defaults seemed fine anyway.
What you actually need
For one site or a small project: check my URL on a schedule, email me when it's down, email me when it's back, show me a history.
Four things. Not a 12-widget dashboard. Not PagerDuty and Opsgenie integrations. Not synthetic transaction monitoring. Just tell me when my site is broken.
One thing, done well
There's a reason the Unix philosophy sticks around. Tools that do one thing well are easier to understand, set up, and trust.
Simple monitoring tools actually get used. Complex ones join the pile of services you signed up for, half-configured, and forgot about within a week.
Right-size your tools
50-person engineering team with hundreds of microservices? Yeah, you need Datadog or PagerDuty.
One website, a side project, or a small SaaS? You need something that takes a minute to set up and costs less than your coffee. Match the tool to the problem.