Monitoring Cost Calculator

Modern observability bills rarely come from one line item — they're metrics, logs, and traces stacked on top of each other, each priced differently, and this calculator breaks out all three. The metrics side multiplies your host count by custom metrics emitted per host to get a total time-series count, prices it per 100 series at your given rate, and adds a flat per-host infrastructure-agent charge (modeled at $15/host/month, representative of typical host-based agent pricing) on top — that host charge is a fixed baseline in this model, not derived from your metric price input. Logs are split into an ingestion cost (GB/day × 30 days × price per GB) and a separate, cheaper retention/storage cost (modeled at roughly $0.03 per GB per day retained), reflecting how observability vendors typically charge more to ingest and index a log than to keep it sitting in storage afterward.

APM cost scales with span volume, converting your monthly trace-span count into millions and multiplying by a per-million-spans rate. All three are summed into a total monthly and annualized cost, along with a per-host average and percentage breakdown showing which pillar — metrics/infra, logs, or APM — is driving your bill. Because the host-monitoring baseline and log-storage rate are fixed assumptions rather than inputs, treat this as a directional estimate for comparing scenarios (adding hosts, cutting log retention, sampling traces) rather than an exact quote — always cross-check against your specific vendor's published pricing tiers and any volume discounts before budgeting.