Maintenant — Self-Hosted Alternative to Datadog for Docker Monitoring

The Datadog Problem

Datadog is a fantastic product. It is also one of the most expensive monitoring solutions on the market.

For a team running 50-100 containers, a typical Datadog bill lands between $50,000 and $100,000 per year. Infrastructure monitoring alone starts at $15/host/month, but once you add APM ($31/host), log management ($0.10/GB ingested + $1.70/million events), and custom metrics ($0.05/metric), costs spiral quickly.

And beyond cost, there is a fundamental trade-off: all your infrastructure data leaves your network. Every container state, every log line, every metric data point flows to Datadog’s cloud. For many organizations — especially in healthcare, finance, or government — that is a non-starter.

Who Should NOT Switch

Let’s be upfront. Maintenant does not replace Datadog if you need:

• APM / distributed tracing — Datadog’s APM is a full OpenTelemetry-compatible tracing platform. Maintenant does not do application-level tracing.
• Log aggregation at scale — Datadog can ingest terabytes of logs with full-text search. Maintenant shows container logs in real-time but does not store or index them.
• 700+ integrations — Datadog integrates with AWS, GCP, Azure, databases, message queues, and everything in between. Maintenant monitors the Docker/Kubernetes layer.
• Multi-region, multi-cloud observability — Datadog is designed for distributed infrastructure across regions. Maintenant is per-host or per-cluster.

If you are a large engineering organization running thousands of microservices across multiple cloud providers, Datadog (or a comparable enterprise tool) is likely the right choice.

Who Should Switch

For a surprising number of teams, Datadog is overkill:

• Self-hosters running 5-100 containers on 1-3 VPS instances
• Small teams who need “are my services up?” not “what is the p99 latency of my gRPC calls?”
• Homelab enthusiasts who want monitoring without a $50K/year SaaS subscription
• Privacy-conscious organizations that cannot or will not send infrastructure data to a third party
• Startups burning runway on monitoring bills that exceed their hosting costs

If you recognize yourself here, read on.

Maintenant vs Datadog — Feature Comparison

The Numbers

What You Get with Maintenant

One container. Zero configuration files. Everything monitored:

• Container auto-discovery — Docker and Kubernetes, states, health checks, restart loops, Compose projects grouped automatically

• HTTP/TCP endpoint monitoring — configured via Docker labels, no YAML
• SSL/TLS certificate tracking — automatic detection, expiration alerts at 30/14/7/3/1 day

• Heartbeat / cron job monitoring — unique ping URL per job, duration tracking, missed execution alerts (10 free, unlimited with Pro)
• System resources — CPU, RAM, network, disk per container and per host

• Update intelligence — OCI digest scan, detect available updates across all containers
• Unified alerts — webhook, Discord (Community), Slack, Teams, Email (Pro)
• Public status page — real-time, SSE updates, incident management (Pro)

• Network security insights — open ports, exposed services, unencrypted endpoints (Pro: unified security posture with CVE enrichment and risk scoring)
• REST API + MCP server — full programmatic access, AI-assistant ready

Migrating from Datadog

There is no migration per se — Maintenant auto-discovers your containers the moment you deploy it. The switch takes 30 seconds:

# docker-compose.yml — add this service
services:
  maintenant:
    image: ghcr.io/kolapsis/maintenant:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - /proc:/host/proc:ro
      - maintenant-data:/data
    environment:
      MAINTENANT_ADDR: "0.0.0.0:8080"
      MAINTENANT_DB: "/data/maintenant.db"
    restart: unless-stopped

volumes:
  maintenant-data:

docker compose up -d

Open http://your-server:8080 — your containers are already there. Add Docker labels to monitor HTTP endpoints:

labels:
  maintenant.endpoint.url: "https://api.example.com/health"
  maintenant.endpoint.interval: "60s"

Once you confirm Maintenant covers your needs, remove the Datadog agent and stop paying.

FAQ

Can I run Maintenant alongside Datadog during a transition? Yes. Maintenant is read-only — it mounts the Docker socket in read-only mode and does not interfere with Datadog’s agent or any other tool.

Does Maintenant support Kubernetes? Yes. Maintenant auto-detects whether it runs on Docker or Kubernetes and adapts accordingly.

What about long-term metric retention? Community edition retains 7 days of metrics. Pro retains up to 1 year. If you need multi-year retention, export via the REST API to your storage of choice.

Is there a free tier? Yes. Maintenant Community is free forever, open source (AGPL-3.0), and includes all core monitoring features. Pro adds advanced alerts, incident management, security posture, and more for 9 €/month.

Where is my data stored? On your server. Maintenant uses an embedded SQLite database. Nothing leaves your infrastructure. Ever.