Dynatrace alternative: Vigil
Updated · prices checked September 2026
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 $149/month for the whole product on your own hardware, and hosted Vigil starts at $19/month. 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: 20 monitors at 5-minute checks, 1 server, 1 status page, 3 team members, 7 days of history, Telegram/Slack/Discord alerts. Commercial use allowed. Free forever.
- Starter $19/month: 50 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 3 servers, 3 status pages, unlimited team members, 30 days of history.
- Pro $49/month: 200 monitors at 1-minute intervals, 15 servers, unlimited team members, 10 status pages with custom domain, password and white-label, 2,000,000 log lines, 5 Kubernetes clusters, RUM, 150 AI analyses, 90 days of history.
- Business $149/month: 1,000 monitors, 100 servers, unlimited team members, 10 identity providers (SSO, SAML, SCIM), 10 private locations, 1-year history.
- Every feature, including SSO, SLOs and private locations, is on every plan; the plans differ only in numbers.
- New accounts start on a 14-day Pro trial with no card, then stay on Free unless you choose a plan. Yearly billing gets 2 months free, no overage charges.
- Self-hosted $149/month per instance on your own server or air-gapped network.
- Add-ons on paid plans from $4: +50 monitors ($5), +5 servers ($5), +5 status pages ($4), +1M log lines ($4).
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 $49 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 | ✓ 20 Free (5-minute checks) / 50 Starter / 200 Pro / 1,000 Business. 1-minute checks on paid plans, 12 monitor types (Uptime, API check, API flow, Browser check, Heartbeat, TCP port, Domain & DNS, App health, Dependency, Content change, Price / number, Keyword) |
| Servers (infrastructure agent) | ✓ OneAgent full-stack: about $58/month per 8 GiB host, or infrastructure-only about $29/month per host | ✓ 1 / 3 / 15 / 100 servers included. Single-file agent for Linux and macOS, PowerShell agent for Windows: CPU, memory, disks, network, processes, services, Docker, packages, vulnerabilities, disk forecasts |
| Logs | ✓ $0.20/GiB ingest plus retention and query charges | ✓ 10k / 250k / 2M / 10M 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 | ~ Any OpenTelemetry SDK can send traces, metrics and logs over OTLP; Vigil's own lightweight SDKs cover Python and Node. Endpoints with p95 and Apdex, stored slow traces, slow queries, N+1 detection, service map. Not a full APM suite: no profiling |
| Kubernetes | ✓ Full Kubernetes observability, $0.002 per pod-hour | ✓ 1 cluster on Free and Starter, 5 on Pro, unlimited on Business. 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, 2 sites / 100k views Starter, 10 sites / 1M views Pro, 50 sites / 10M views Business |
| 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 and custom CSS on every plan including Free; white-label on paid plans. 1 / 3 / 10 / 50 pages |
| Team seats | ✓ Users are not charged | ✓ 3 on Free, unlimited on every paid plan. Owner / admin / member / viewer roles |
| 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, phone push. Tickets to PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Jira, ServiceNow, Zendesk (1 ticketing channel on Free, more on paid plans). No SMS or phone calls on the hosted service; the self-hosted edition pages by SMS and call through your own Twilio account |
| Self-hosted option | ~ Dynatrace Managed exists for enterprises; no public pricing, sales-led. Vigil self-hosted is $149/month with a one-line installer | ✓ Full product on your server or air-gapped network, $149/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 / 30 / 150 / 1,000 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 | ✓ $19/month on Starter (3 servers, 50 monitors, unlimited team members 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
Limits of Dynatrace that Vigil does not have:
- 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 $149/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
- Browser checks use a short line-by-line script run in headless Chromium (with screenshots), not full Playwright test code kept in git.
- No SMS or phone-call alerting on the hosted service (the self-hosted edition can page by SMS and call through your own Twilio account); hosted alerts go to chat apps, phone push, email, webhooks and ticketing tools.
- On-call is simple: rotations, overrides, escalation and acknowledgements, without the scheduling depth of PagerDuty or incident.io.
- Vigil's own APM SDKs are Python and Node; other languages send traces through any OpenTelemetry SDK over OTLP. There is no profiling, and 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 $149/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 Business 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 traces from Vigil's Python and Node SDKs or any OpenTelemetry SDK. OneAgent auto-instruments every language with no code changes; Vigil does not.
How much would 3 servers and 50 monitors cost on each?
Vigil Starter: $19/month, which covers exactly 3 servers and 50 monitors. 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: every new account gets 14 days of Pro, no card. When the trial ends the account stays on Free (20 monitors) unless you choose a plan, and everything you set up stays.
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