I was a previous datadog customer and loved their services but their pricing was expensive for us, and we did not need all the features.
Take a look at site24x7.com I have been absolutely blown away by the array of features that they offer.
There are agents for data collection, external port monitors, webhooks for alerting / pagerduty, slack.
We even use it in conjunction with commando.io to handle process restarts, system reboots if problems are detected with external monitoring that our internal watchdog processes don't catch.
​
There are smtp monitors, ping, tcp, http(s), ssl certificate expiration notifications - its extremely comprehensive.
>We even use it in conjunction with commando.io to handle process restarts, system reboots if problems are detected with external monitoring that our internal watchdog processes don't catch. Interesting, looks like "rundeck as a service". Personally I would not trust an external service to log into our servers, but I can see that it could be quite useful to automate less critical actions.
We used to use datadog but found it to be way to expensive for our needs. Don't get me wrong its amazing but, it does have a huge cost. We were able to setup site24x7.com with an annual subscription for about 2-3 months of cost from DD.
Our monitoring stack:
Site24x7 - APM, External URL monitoring, SMTP mailflow monitoring, ssl expirations and process monitoring.
StatusCake - for URL monitoring and confirmation - It's our backup just in case site24x7 misses something (It does not) but SC is more flexible for external port and service monitoring for our needs.
Both tools escalate to PagerDuty, and then we get our escalations in slack.
SumoLogic - for log monitoring (it’s a great tool but a little complicated for our needs)
From slack we can ack, or remedy the alert.
We then have a lot of site24x7 automations that then connect to commando.io for 'BedOps' as we call it - where an alert gets triggered, we kick of a few scripts or automations as an attempt to remedy the situation (99% of the time the automation + our scripts keep us out of trouble)
We have internal runbooks in our KB for when the automatons fail or if there is something out of the scope that needs to be fixed.
​
It seems like you are doing something like these guys so perhaps it can help you with pricing.
I think something like this is definitely worth supporting. A small price per server for access to recipes or a micro payment (like in app payments) for just the apps they want or need. A free ad supported version maybe for everyone else.
I'd do that for something that was reliable and consistent and would save me the hassle. especially for something configurable to my particular set-up needs.