Better Stack

Better Stack has emerged as one of the most compelling European observability platforms since its founding in 2021 in Prague, Czech Republic. Built by a team of infrastructure engineers who grew frustrated with the fragmented state of monitoring tooling, Better Stack unifies uptime monitoring, incident management, on-call scheduling, status pages, and log management into a single coherent product. The result is a platform that genuinely replaces multiple US-based tools -- PagerDuty for on-call, Datadog for monitoring, and even New Relic for application performance -- while keeping all data processing firmly within European jurisdiction.

The platform's rapid ascent is no accident. Better Stack raised significant venture capital and attracted a user base that spans solo developers running side projects on the free tier to enterprise teams managing hundreds of services. What separates it from the crowded monitoring market is not just feature breadth, but the deliberate focus on developer experience. The dashboard feels modern and fast, configuration is largely code-driven with Terraform support, and alerting logic avoids the kind of noise that plagues legacy tools.

Uptime Monitoring and Multi-Location Verification

Better Stack's uptime monitoring checks your websites, APIs, and services from multiple geographic locations simultaneously. Every incident is verified from at least three regions before an alert fires, which eliminates the false positives that erode trust in monitoring systems. Checks run as frequently as every 30 seconds, and the platform supports HTTP, HTTPS, ping, TCP, DNS, and even keyword-based monitoring. Each incident generates a second-by-second timeline that shows exactly when and where degradation occurred, making post-incident reviews far more productive.

The multi-location verification is particularly valuable for European businesses that serve traffic across the continent. If a check fails from Frankfurt but succeeds from Amsterdam and London, Better Stack will not wake your on-call engineer at 3 AM for a transient routing issue. This intelligent filtering, combined with configurable escalation policies, means your team only gets paged for genuine problems.

Log Management and Structured Data

Better Stack's log management platform, called Better Stack Logs (formerly Logtail), ingests logs from virtually any source -- servers, containers, applications, edge functions -- and transforms them into structured, queryable data. You can search your entire log history using SQL, which is a meaningful departure from the proprietary query languages that Datadog and Splunk impose on users. For teams already comfortable with SQL, the learning curve is essentially zero.

The platform supports live tail for real-time debugging, saved queries for recurring investigations, and dashboards that visualize log patterns over time. Log data is stored with full-text indexing, so even high-volume environments remain fast to search. Pricing is based on data ingestion rather than per-host or per-container, which tends to be significantly cheaper than Datadog's model for teams running microservices architectures.

Incident Management and On-Call Scheduling

The incident management module brings PagerDuty-style functionality into the same platform as your monitoring. You can define on-call rotations, set escalation policies with multiple tiers, and configure notification channels including phone calls, SMS, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email. Unlimited phone call alerts are included even on lower-tier plans, which is a notable differentiator -- PagerDuty charges extra for phone notifications at scale.

When an incident fires, Better Stack automatically creates a timeline, links related alerts using smart incident merging, and provides a central war room for coordination. The merging logic is particularly well-designed: if your database goes down and triggers 47 separate check failures across dependent services, Better Stack rolls them into a single incident rather than flooding your on-call engineer with noise. Post-incident, you can generate reports that include timeline, response metrics, and resolution notes for compliance or retrospective purposes.

Status Pages

Every Better Stack account includes the ability to create public or private status pages. These are fully branded, hosted on a custom domain, and automatically updated when incidents are detected. You can also manually post scheduled maintenance windows and provide subscriber notifications via email. For SaaS companies that need to communicate uptime to customers, this eliminates the need for a separate tool like Atlassian Statuspage or Instatus.

The status pages integrate directly with your uptime monitors, so there is no manual step between detecting an outage and reflecting it publicly. This automation is valuable during high-pressure incidents when the last thing your team wants to do is manually update a status page while simultaneously debugging production.

Integrations and Developer Experience

Better Stack offers over 100 integrations covering the major tools in a modern engineering stack. Native connections exist for Slack, Microsoft Teams, PagerDuty (for migration), Grafana, Terraform, Vercel, Heroku, AWS, Google Cloud, and many more. The Terraform provider is especially important for infrastructure-as-code teams that want to manage their monitoring configuration alongside their deployment pipelines.

The API is well-documented and RESTful, making custom integrations straightforward. Better Stack also provides client libraries for popular programming languages and frameworks, along with a CLI tool for power users who prefer terminal-based workflows. The platform supports webhook-based alerting for custom notification flows and integrates with ChatOps tooling for teams that manage incidents in Slack channels.

Pricing and Value Proposition

Better Stack operates on a freemium model that is genuinely useful at the free tier -- you get basic uptime monitoring, incident management, and a status page without entering a credit card. Paid plans start from $24 per month (approximately 22 EUR) and scale based on the number of monitors, log volume, and team size. The pricing is transparent and predictable, which stands in contrast to Datadog's notoriously complex billing that often surprises teams with unexpected overages.

For mid-size engineering teams, the total cost of replacing PagerDuty, a Datadog-level monitoring tool, and a status page service with Better Stack typically represents a 40-60% cost reduction. The consolidation benefit extends beyond price: having a single platform means fewer context switches, a unified alerting pipeline, and simpler onboarding for new team members.

GDPR Compliance and European Data Sovereignty

As a Czech company operating within the European Union, Better Stack processes and stores data under GDPR. This is not a bolt-on compliance checkbox -- it is the platform's default operating mode. For European businesses subject to data residency requirements, or those simply uncomfortable with the implications of the US CLOUD Act, Better Stack provides a monitoring stack where sensitive log data, incident metadata, and operational telemetry never leave European jurisdiction.

The company maintains data processing agreements (DPAs) and provides transparency about sub-processors. For organizations in regulated industries such as finance, healthcare, or government, this European-first posture simplifies procurement and compliance review processes significantly compared to negotiating data residency guarantees with US-based vendors.

Who Should Use Better Stack?

Better Stack is best suited for engineering teams that want to consolidate their monitoring, incident management, and logging into a single platform without sacrificing capability. Startups and scale-ups benefit from the generous free tier and predictable scaling costs. Enterprise teams benefit from the European data residency, the unified platform reducing vendor sprawl, and the Terraform-native configuration model. DevOps engineers, SREs, and platform teams will find the product immediately familiar if they have previously used PagerDuty, Datadog, or similar tools.

Teams that rely heavily on APM (Application Performance Monitoring) with deep code-level tracing may find Better Stack's current offering less mature than Datadog or New Relic in that specific area. However, for the majority of monitoring, alerting, logging, and incident management workflows, Better Stack delivers a polished and increasingly competitive product from the heart of Europe.