By Zoha Ahmed · Nov 1, 2026
Ask Reddit what to use for monitoring and the thread splits in two within a few replies. We read all 288 replies in 30 of those threads from the past year, mostly in r/sysadmin and r/devops with r/cybersecurity and r/kubernetes behind them, counted one vote per person, and removed 9 vendor posts about their own products.
This is the fewest threads of any ranking we have published. The comment count is healthy at 288, but it comes from 30 threads against the 48 and 71 behind our other categories, so a few large ones carry the result: the two biggest, both in r/sysadmin, produced about a third of every tool mention we counted. Zabbix is clear at the top, but Splunk at 12 recommendations against 10 complaints and Elastic at 7 against 6 are ties rather than verdicts, and nothing separated by two or three votes is a ranking.
The split that runs through every thread is free and self-hosted against paid and hosted, and the complaints follow it almost exactly. Every complaint about a paid tool here is about money, and almost every complaint about a free one is about the work of running it. Every quote below links to the comment it came from.
The ranking
| Tool | Recommend | Complain | Threads | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 39 | 9 | 7 | |
| 2 | 25 | 8 | 17 | |
| 3 | 17 | 2 | 6 | |
| 4 | 12 | 5 | 11 | |
| 5 | 12 | 10 | 9 | |
| 6 | 9 | 1 | 7 | |
| 7 | 8 | 3 | 6 | |
| 8 | 7 | 6 | 7 | |
| 9 | 5 | 2 | 3 | |
| 10 | 5 | 4 | 3 | |
| 11 | 3 | 0 | 3 | |
| 12 | 2 | 0 | 2 |
"Recommend" and "Complain" count different people, not comments. With 238 commenters, a gap of two or three votes means nothing. Also named, with too few opinions to rank: Honeycomb, Coralogix, OpenObserve, LogicMonitor and Sentry, each with one or two opinions in our sample.
1. Zabbix
Zabbix
Best overall
The most recommended tool here by a wide margin, and its top comment is the highest-voted recommendation in any category we have counted.
Why people recommend it
- Free, with no paywalled features
- Templates and auto-discovery cover SNMP, ICMP and agent checks
- Veteran users say the day-to-day work is light
Common complaints
- It needs an owner, and buries signals when nobody tunes it
- Simple tasks take more steps than they should
- Weak at syslog, and some proxies failed quietly
What Redditors said
Zabbix is one of the easier ones that fits your criteria.
once you get familiar with it the day to day is easy
it seems geared toward a place where you have a dedicated masseuse who can spend lots of time and effort massaging it.
2. Grafana
Grafana
Best dashboards
Named in 17 threads, more than anything else here. People recommend the dashboards and complain about the bill for feeding them.
Why people recommend it
- The dashboard layer almost everyone standardises on
- Loki gives central logging without an Elasticsearch cluster to run
- The Cloud free tier is generous enough that small teams stop self-hosting
Common complaints
- Past the free tier, billing is per series and climbs faster than people expect
- The full Grafana, Prometheus, Loki and Alertmanager stack is too much for a few servers
What Redditors said
grafana cloud is the least painful move off a self-hosted prom+grafana stack
after the free tier it's per-1k-series and costs add up quicker than you'd expect.
3. Checkmk
Checkmk
Best for fast setup
Third in the table with almost no complaints, and the pick when people want monitoring running the same afternoon.
Why people recommend it
- Automatic discovery attaches checks when you add an SNMP device
- Installs and upgrades called straightforward
Common complaints
- The edition split and how it is distributed annoy some users
- One person could not get its model of hosts, folders and rules to click
What Redditors said
Personally, CheckMK has been great
I tried checkmk out and had the hardest time wrapping my head around it.
4. Prometheus
Prometheus
Best for Kubernetes
The default for anything on Kubernetes, and a poor fit for the network gear the sysadmin threads care about.
Why people recommend it
- kube-prometheus-stack ships working alerts and dashboards
- Managed Prometheus called the least disruptive move off self-hosting
Common complaints
- Network monitoring turns into MIB management, which people hated
- A steeper learning curve than Zabbix, from people who tried both
What Redditors said
I switched from the prometheus community helm chart to the kube-prometheus-stack because it has (had?) better compatibility with ready made dashboards
Problem with using Prometheus for this is it becomes a mib management nightmare.
5. Splunk
Splunk
Best logs, worst invoice
Twelve recommendations against ten complaints, and each side argues about something different: one capability, the other the invoice.
Why people recommend it
- The deepest log and SIEM feature set here
- Still the skill people say to learn first
Common complaints
- Ingestion-based licensing, raised in almost every thread it appears in
- Consultants described customers moving to Sentinel
What Redditors said
Splunk is a more fully featured siem so you might get a bit more out of it.
we have seen a large shift away from splunk the last couple of years.
6. VictoriaMetrics
VictoriaMetrics
Best at high cardinality
Where people go when cardinality or storage cost breaks a Prometheus setup. One complaint in our sample, about the interface.
Why people recommend it
- Drops in where Prometheus was, so dashboards and queries carry over
- Compression and query speed hold up as series counts climb
Common complaints
- The interface called dated next to the commercial tools
What Redditors said
I would humbly recommend VictoriaMetrics, using it and it is very performant and easy to implement
VictoriaLogs/VictoriaMetrics both have that grim outdated Material Design style
7. Datadog
Datadog
Best paid platform
The paid platform people defend and dread. All three complaints here are about the bill, and two are about being surprised by it.
Why people recommend it
- Metrics, logs and traces in one platform, with no plugins to assemble
- The agent instruments applications without anyone writing tracing code
- The people paying for it say it is the only tool that earned the money
Common complaints
- Billing is metered on cardinality, which ambushes small teams after they commit
- One team reported spending more than $100,000 a month
What Redditors said
Datadog is expensive but it's the only tool I have felt that was worth the money.
datadog would've bankrupted a 3-person team anyway
We are over $100,000 a month in Datadog subscription costs.
8. Elastic
Elastic
Best for log and security search
Seven recommendations against six complaints, and the split is clean: people like what it finds and hate running it.
Why people recommend it
- Log search and SIEM capability rated above the EDR vendors' own tools
- Filebeat and Kibana take syslog and application logs without custom work
Common complaints
- Self-hosted ELK needs constant attention from a small team
- Shard and index management makes engineers part-time data engineers
What Redditors said
ELK with Filebeat for syslog.
Elastic being a pain to run with a small team is basically the default experience
9. SigNoz
SigNoz
Best single binary
The open-source all-in-one suggested when somebody wants OpenTelemetry data without running four services.
Why people recommend it
- One binary for metrics, logs and traces
- OpenTelemetry-native, so instrumentation is not vendor-specific
Common complaints
- One team reported a buggy interface and slow support
- It lost a head-to-head trial against the Grafana stack
What Redditors said
a single-binary one like signoz or openobserve cuts most of that toil
Tried signoz. Very bad experience, specially with support.
10. PRTG
PRTG
Best for small networks
The simple Windows option for a small network, and the clearest case here of a price rise changing people's minds.
Why people recommend it
- Faster to get running than Zabbix, per people who chose it over Zabbix
- Handles manufacturer MIBs without the work Prometheus needs
Common complaints
- Current pricing stopped recommendations and renewals
- Agentless polling struggles once there are a lot of servers
What Redditors said
I went with PRTG over Zabbix due to how stupidly simple PRTG was to get up and running.
with their current pricing I couldn't select it in good faith.
11. Better Stack
Better Stack
Best free uptime tier
A small count from the uptime threads, with no complaints in our sample.
Why people recommend it
- A free plan people called unusually generous
- Alert rate-limiting, SMS and calls on cheap tiers
Common complaints
- None in our sample
What Redditors said
Big fan of better stack
12. Dynatrace
Dynatrace
Too few opinions to judge
Two recommendations across two threads and nothing against it, too little to rank on. The only enterprise platform here nobody complained about.
Why people recommend it
- Automatic instrumentation through the agent, like Datadog's
- Named a key player, quoted slightly below Datadog
Common complaints
- None in our sample
What Redditors said
The only one that hasnt been mentioned and is a key player is Dynatrace.
The ones Reddit complains about
Both drew more complaints than recommendations, and both rest on three or four opinions, so they are here for what the complaints say rather than where they would rank. Nobody attacked New Relic's product, they questioned its future. OpenSearch's problem is operating it, which is the same problem people describe about Elastic.
New Relic
New Relic
The one people are leaving
Named in 6 threads and recommended by one person. The complaints are not about features but about where the product is heading.
Why people recommend it
- The free tier called plenty, and powerful, for a small footprint
Common complaints
- One commenter said flatly that the product is in decline
- Oversized for teams who wanted host metrics
What Redditors said
their free tier is plenty. Very powerful
New Relic is circling the drain.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch
Complaints about running it
Three complaints and one lukewarm recommendation across 6 threads. Two complaints come from comments that name Elastic in the same breath, so read this as the ELK operating story, not a verdict on the fork.
Why people recommend it
- Suggested as a free interim option
Common complaints
- Setup called painful
- Self-hosted storage and compute ran higher than expected
What Redditors said
you can use OpenSearch for now.
But yes, a pain to set up
How we built this ranking
We pulled every Reddit thread from the past 12 months in sysadmin, devops, Kubernetes and security subreddits, then kept those about infrastructure monitoring, observability platforms and log aggregation. An AI model read each comment that named a tool and labelled it as a recommendation, a complaint or a neutral mention, and we checked that every quote appears word for word in the original comment. Nine vendor posts were removed, as was any opinion copy-pasted across accounts. Two caveats. This ranking rests on 30 threads, fewer than any other we have built, so the long tail of the table is two or three opinions per brand. And we tested it for coordinated promotion, because 96% of the authors here have two or fewer comments in the whole pull, which makes posting history useless as a signal. Votes are not: Zabbix's top recommendation scored 83 points, VictoriaMetrics 31 and Checkmk 27, and every brand near the top has one the thread upvoted. Real recommendations collect votes, these did, and we found nothing to exclude. This ranking reflects the data as of November 2026.
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What is the best monitoring tool according to Reddit?
Zabbix, by a wide margin. 39 people recommended it against 25 for Grafana, its nearest rival, and its top comment is the highest-voted recommendation in any category we have measured. It is free and covers network and host monitoring out of the box. The catch is that somebody has to own it.
Is Datadog worth the money?
These threads are split. 8 people recommended it, and the ones who did said it is the only tool that earned its price. All 3 complaints are about cost, and two are about surprise rather than the sticker price: billing is metered on cardinality, so the invoice grows with what you send it. One team reported more than $100,000 a month.
What is the best free monitoring stack?
Zabbix or Checkmk for infrastructure, Prometheus with Grafana for anything on Kubernetes. Checkmk drew 17 recommendations against 2 complaints, the cleanest ratio in the table. VictoriaMetrics is what people move to when a self-hosted Prometheus runs out of room.
Zabbix or Grafana?
They are not really competing. Zabbix collects and alerts, Grafana draws dashboards over whatever is collecting, and plenty of people here run both. The argument that does happen is Zabbix against the Prometheus and Grafana stack, and it turns on what you are watching: network gear pushes people to Zabbix, Kubernetes pushes them to Prometheus.