Self-hosted observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki
Metrics, logs, errors and product analytics you host yourself — so telemetry never leaves your network.
Most observability money is wasted on dashboards nobody opens and alerts everyone has muted. The useful version answers three questions: is it broken, what changed, and where is the time going. Everything else is decoration with a per-gigabyte price attached.
Self-hosting the stack matters for two reasons. Cost, because vendor observability pricing scales with the volume of data you generate and becomes one of the larger line items surprisingly fast. And confidentiality, because logs and traces routinely contain exactly the data you promised a regulator would not leave your infrastructure.
Prometheus & Grafana, specifically.
Is self-hosting this a lot of work to run?
It is real work, and we will not pretend otherwise. Prometheus and Loki need retention, storage and cardinality managed or they become the largest thing in your cluster. We size it, set the guardrails and document the operational tasks — and if the volume is small, we will say a managed vendor is the better answer.
Why does log and metric cardinality keep coming up?
Because it is the single most common way these systems get expensive. One label containing a user ID or a request ID multiplies series count without bound. Label discipline at instrumentation time is most of what keeps a self-hosted stack affordable.
Can PostHog and Sentry really be self-hosted?
Yes, both offer self-hosted deployments, and we run them where data residency or confidentiality requires it. They are heavier to operate than their cloud versions — a fair trade when the alternative is sending user behaviour and stack traces off your network.
Tell us what you are building.
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right firm for the problem. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.