Best Monitoring Tools for Startups in 2026: From Side Project to Series A (opens in new tab)

Startups make two monitoring mistakes. The first is spending $500/month on Datadog before they have paying customers — full-stack observability for a service that handles 200 requests per day. The second is spending $0/month on nothing until a production outage takes the app down for 45 minutes and the first Hacker News comment reads "looks like it's dead." Both mistakes share the same root cause: treating monitoring as a binary choice between enterprise observability and hope. Startups don't...