Dynatrace alternative: Vigil
Teams look for a Dynatrace alternative when they inherit an enterprise contract that is out of proportion to three servers and a website, or when they need an on-premises deployment without a six-figure conversation. Vigil self-hosted is $49/month for the whole product on your own hardware, and Vigil Pro is $10/month hosted. You give up Davis AI and automatic full-stack tracing.
Why people look for a Dynatrace alternative
Dynatrace pricing September 2026
- Full-Stack Monitoring: $0.01 per memory-GiB-hour, so an 8 GiB host is about $0.08/hour, roughly $58/month per host.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: $0.04 per host-hour, roughly $29/month per host.
- Kubernetes Platform Monitoring: $0.002 per pod-hour.
- Logs: $0.20 per GiB ingested, $0.0007 per GiB-day retained, $0.0035 per GiB scanned by queries.
- Synthetic HTTP monitors: $0.001 per request. Real User Monitoring: $0.00225 per session. 15-day free trial, no free plan.
- Dynatrace Managed (on-premises) has no public price; it is sold through sales.
Source: as of September 2026, from dynatrace.com/pricing (Dynatrace Platform Subscription list prices). Vendors change prices; the Dynatrace site is authoritative.
Vigil pricing
- Free: 10 monitors, 1 server, 1 status page, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Free forever.
- Pro $10/month: 100 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 5 servers, 5 seats, 5 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 1M log lines, 3 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 100 AI analyses. 10-day trial, no card.
- Enterprise $25/month: 500 monitors, 50 servers, unlimited seats, SSO, SLOs, private locations, 1-year history. 30-day trial.
- Self-hosted $49/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons from $2: +25 monitors, +5 servers ($3), +5 seats, +5 status pages, +1M log lines.
Flat monthly prices, no per-host, per-GB or per-run meters. Full plan matrix.
Feature and price comparison
✓ included · ~ partial or paid add-on · ✕ not offered. Vigil figures are for the $10 Pro plan unless stated.
| Dynatrace | Vigil | |
|---|---|---|
| Uptime / API monitors and fastest interval | ✓ Synthetic HTTP and browser monitors from many regions, $0.001 per HTTP request | ✓ 10 Free / 100 Pro / 500 Enterprise. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 11 monitor types (uptime, API assertions, multi-step flows, heartbeats, TCP, domain/DNS, app health, dependency, change, price, keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ OneAgent full-stack: about $58/month per 8 GiB host, or infrastructure-only about $29/month per host | ✓ 1 / 5 / 50 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✓ $0.20/GiB ingest plus retention and query charges | ✓ 100k / 1M / 5M lines included. File and journald shipping, full-text search, live tail, log-alert rules |
| APM / traces | ✓ Automatic distributed tracing and profiling in every major language; best in class | ~ Endpoint latency and 5xx rates, request traces and a service map through the agent's Python and Node SDKs. Not a full APM: no profiling, no distributed tracing across other languages |
| Kubernetes | ✓ Full Kubernetes observability, $0.002 per pod-hour | ✓ 3 clusters on Pro, unlimited on Enterprise. DaemonSet manifest; incidents for CrashLoopBackOff, OOMKilled, NotReady, pressure |
| Real User Monitoring | ✓ Session-level RUM and session replay, $0.00225 per session | ✓ Web Vitals p75, page views, JS errors. 1 site Free, 5 sites / 500k views Pro, 50 sites / 5M views Enterprise |
| Status pages: private, custom domain, white-label | ✕ No customer-facing status pages | ✓ Private by default, password or private-link sharing, custom domain with automatic HTTPS, white-label and custom CSS on Pro. 1 / 5 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ✓ Users are not charged | ✓ 1 Free, 5 Pro, unlimited Enterprise. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles, +5 seats for $2 |
| Alert channels (incl. Telegram) | ✓ PagerDuty, Slack, Teams, ServiceNow, Jira, email, webhooks; Telegram via webhook | ✓ Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, Google Chat, Matrix, ntfy, Gotify, Pushover, webhooks (HMAC, templates), email. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk on paid plans. No SMS or phone calls |
| Self-hosted option | ~ Dynatrace Managed exists for enterprises; no public pricing, sales-led. Vigil self-hosted is $49/month with a one-line installer | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $49/month per instance, one-line installer, signed releases |
| AI incident analysis | ✓ Davis AI causal root cause across the topology; deeper than Vigil's per-incident analysis | ✓ One-click root cause, fix and postmortem draft from the incident's evidence. 5 / 100 / 500 analyses a month |
| Small team: 3 servers, 50 monitors, 5 people | 3 full-stack hosts about $175/month; 50 HTTP monitors every minute about $2,160/month (about $430 at 5-minute intervals); logs on top. Users free | ✓ $10/month on Pro (5 servers, 100 monitors, 5 seats included) |
Small-team estimate uses public list prices and the cheapest tier that covers 3 servers, 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals and 5 people. Where a vendor meters by run, GB or hour we show the arithmetic so you can redo it with your own numbers.
What Dynatrace does well
- Davis AI root-cause analysis across the whole topology is the real thing; nothing in this list matches it.
- OneAgent auto-instruments everything on a host: processes, services, traces, logs, with no code changes.
- Enterprise scale, compliance, and a managed on-premises edition for regulated environments.
Where Vigil is ahead
- Hourly metering across hosts, pods, GiB and requests: 50 HTTP monitors every minute is 2.2 million requests, about $2,160/month on synthetics alone.
- No customer-facing status pages, no Telegram, no free plan.
- The self-hosted (Managed) edition is enterprise-sales only with no published price, versus Vigil self-hosted at $49/month.
- Far more product than a 5-person team can operate or afford.
When to pick Dynatrace instead
Pick Dynatrace if you run a large estate where automatic topology discovery and causal AI pay for themselves, if you need enterprise compliance and support, or if your organisation already has the contract and the people to run it.
What Vigil does not do
- No browser / Playwright checks: Vigil scripts APIs, not clicks in a real browser.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting; alerts go to chat apps, push services, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- No on-call rotations or schedules: escalation policies and acknowledgements only.
- APM covers Python and Node apps on hosts running the agent; it is not a substitute for a full APM suite.
- Checks run from Vigil's servers plus private locations you host; there is no menu of dozens of public regions.
Moving from Dynatrace to Vigil
1. Export what you have
List your Dynatrace monitors (their API or UI export). You need a name, URL or host, interval and the expected status or keyword for each.
2. Apply as code
Write them as Vigil's YAML and apply with PUT /api/v1/config; the same endpoint exports everything back, so monitors can live in git. Or create them one by one through the REST API (monitors, incidents, maintenance, deploy markers).
3. Reconnect alerts
Add Telegram, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy, Pushover, email or webhook channels; set escalation to a second channel set. Point your cron jobs at the new heartbeat URLs and install the server agent with one command.
Run both side by side during the trial: Vigil's alert ingestion accepts Alertmanager and Grafana-style webhooks, so existing alerts can appear on a Vigil status page while you move over.
Frequently asked
Is there a self-hosted Dynatrace alternative with public pricing?
Vigil's self-hosted edition is $49/month per instance: a one-line installer sets up Docker, Caddy with automatic HTTPS and Postgres, releases are signed, licences work offline, and it carries Enterprise limits. Dynatrace Managed is sold only through sales.
Does Vigil have anything like Davis AI?
Vigil's AI analysis works per incident: it reads the failing checks, evidence body, server metrics and traces and returns the likely cause, a fix and a postmortem draft. It does not build a causal model of your whole topology like Davis does.
What does Vigil's agent collect compared to OneAgent?
CPU, memory, disks, I/O, network, processes, services, Docker, packages and vulnerabilities, log files and journald, database metrics, and endpoint traces from Python and Node apps via SDKs. OneAgent auto-instruments every language with no code changes; Vigil does not.
How much would 3 servers and 50 monitors cost on each?
Vigil Pro: $10/month. Dynatrace at list price: about $175/month for three full-stack 8 GiB hosts plus about $2,160/month for 50 HTTP synthetic monitors every minute (or about $430 at 5-minute intervals), plus logs by GiB.
Ready to leave Dynatrace?
Start free: 10-day Pro trial, no card. Everything you set up stays on the Free plan when the trial ends.
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