The question gets asked on r/node every few months, on r/selfhosted every few weeks, and on Hacker News whenever a Datadog invoice goes viral. Some variant of: "What are you actually using for observability on small or side projects?"
The answers always go the same way. Someone confesses to Datadog and feels bad about it. Someone defends a Grafana + Prometheus stack they spent a weekend wiring up. Someone pitches their YC-funded unified-observability tool. Eventually a quieter voice admits they're using Sentry for errors and UptimeRobot for uptime and not much else. The quieter voice gets upvoted but rarely defended.
The quieter voice is right. Observability for an indie app on a single host isn't a stack you build, it's a small set of pillars you can mostly skip. This is the case for skipping.
Observability is not one thing
The mistake the unified-observability vendors want you to make is treating observability as one category. It isn't. It's four to seven separate concerns, ranked here by how often a one-person team genuinely needs them:
