If you just want the recommendation: for a small startup building a basic hosted app health dashboard, choose a simple metrics-and-logs API when custom counters and gauges are enough; keep Prometheus or a fuller observability platform for alerting, tracing, and serious infrastructure diagnosis.
Short answer: Infrai is a reasonable simple choice for pushing health-related custom metrics and searching logs, while Healthchecks should cover silent scheduled-job failures and Prometheus, Grafana Cloud, or Datadog should remain on the shortlist when the dashboard must grow into deeper monitoring.
That distinction matters more than the logo. I design storage and data layers, so I want to know what happens when a database ping slows down, a queue backs up, or a health check stops arriving; a cheerful green aggregate can conceal all three. A useful first dashboard can still be small, but its limits need names.
What is the best simple hosted API for a Node.js app health dashboard?
Start with the signals, not the chart library. For the narrow version of this problem, I would report a counter such as healthcheck_success, a gauge such as queue_depth, and a timing value such as db_ping_ms. Those values answer whether the process is alive, whether work is accumulating, and whether a critical dependency is getting slow. The API supports pushing counters and gauges and querying metrics, so it fits that basic shape without asking a small team to operate Prometheus.
