Prometheus + Grafana · Infrastructure monitoring
Self-hosting Prometheus + Grafana for 5 servers: the cost
At 5 monitored servers, Prometheus + Grafana needs 1.3 GB of memory and 11 GB of disk. That fits the Starter 2 GB at VPSServer for $10.00 a month. Add backups and the time it takes to look after and the real figure is $124 a month.
- Server
- $10.00Starter 2 GB, 1 vCPU
- Backups
- $2.00provider snapshots
- Your time
- $1121.5 h a month at $75
- All in
- $124per month
- First-time setup
- $450about 6 hours, once
How 1.3 GB was arrived at
1 GB covers the stack at rest, every container the project ships included. 5 monitored servers at 10 MB each adds 0.1 GB, giving 1.1 GB. Adding 25% headroom so the machine is not run at its ceiling gives 1.3 GB, and the smallest plan at or above that is the Starter 2 GB with 2 GB.
Disk works the same way: 10 GB to begin with, plus 0.2 GB per server, so 11 GB against the 50 GB the plan includes.
Prometheus collects the metrics and Grafana draws the dashboards, with Alertmanager for alerts and node_exporter on each server. Disk follows Prometheus's own capacity formula at its default 15-day retention: about 1,000 series per server scraped every 15 seconds at 2 bytes per sample is roughly 0.2 GB per server. Memory per server is our estimate for the same series count.
Over three years
| Period | Server and backups | Your time | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup, once | — | $450 | $450 |
| Per month | $12.00 | $112 | $124 |
| First year | $144 | $1,800 | $1,944 |
| 36 months | $432 | $4,500 | $4,932 |
If you do not price your own time, the 36-month figure is $432 instead. Both numbers are real; which one applies depends on whether the hours would otherwise have been billable.
What you would be paying instead at this size
| Commercial product | Tier | Per month | Difference | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Datadog | Infrastructure Pro | $75.00 | -$49.50 | breakdown |
A positive difference means self-hosting is cheaper at this size, with your time already counted.
Where to put Prometheus + Grafana
1.3 GB of memory and 11 GB of disk is what this needs at 5 servers. The cheapest plan that fits, among the providers whose prices we have read ourselves, is the Starter 2 GB at VPSServer for $10.00 a month.
We are not claiming this is the cheapest server on the internet. It is the cheapest one we can honestly quote. Hetzner Cloud, Vultr and PikaPods publish prices we could not read programmatically, and Hetzner in particular is usually cheaper per gigabyte of memory than anything quoted above. Price them yourself before you commit.
The VPSServer link above is an affiliate link, run through the same programme as our Kamatera link; VPSServer and Kamatera belong to the same group. If you sign up through it we may earn a commission, but the programme does not state an amount for VPSServer. That never changes the computed costs, which server is chosen, or the conclusion of this page. The sizing model and every price source are published in full.
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