DevOps Monitoring Stack — Multi-Service Observability

The Zorost DevOps Monitoring Stack is a self-hosted, configuration-driven observability platform for teams running multiple services on their own infrastructure. It delivers per-application dashboards, HTTP health monitoring, metric aggregation, log collection, and alerting from one isolated stack — without modifying any of the applications it watches.

It is the kind of stack that small platform teams keep building badly every couple of years. We built it well, and we open-sourced it.

The challenge

Small and mid platform teams have an observability problem the analyst reports rarely cover: they run too many services to use a single Prometheus tutorial and not enough to justify a six-figure SaaS observability bill. The result is a homemade solution that takes a quarter to build, breaks the first time someone touches it, and ages badly the moment the engineer who built it changes jobs.

What the rest of the industry does

• Hosted observability platforms are excellent and scale into significant monthly bills before most teams expect.
• DIY Prometheus tutorials get a single app monitored and stop there. The multi-app, per-app dashboard pattern is left as an exercise.
• SSH plus curl is the unspoken monitoring strategy at a surprising number of teams until their first 3 AM outage.

The Zorost advantage

• Read-only and isolated. The stack cannot modify the applications it watches. It lives on its own network and is safe to add and safe to remove.
• Multi-application by design. Per-application dashboards and alert rules are first-class. Adding a new monitored service is a configuration change, not a refactor.
• Full observability triad. Metrics, logs, and alerting from a single composed stack — no custom glue.
• Lean by intent. Designed to run with a small memory footprint so it fits on the same infrastructure the customer already pays for.
• Open source and configuration-driven. Targets are declared in plain configuration; nothing is magic.

How we approach it

The stack is delivered as a composed set of best-of-breed open-source observability components, wired together by configuration. Targets — the applications to monitor — are declared as a simple list. Each target gets a dedicated dashboard folder, an HTTP health check, and a standardized set of alert rules. Logs are collected and queryable per application.

The deployment posture is intentionally read-only. The monitoring stack runs in its own network namespace and reaches the target applications through standard monitoring interfaces only. Removing the stack does not affect any of the workloads it was watching.

Optional test folders allow teams to run smoke tests, end-to-end checks, and lightweight load tests as part of the same operational cadence as monitoring.

Capability categories

• HTTP health monitoring — per-target liveness checks with configurable cadence and thresholds.
• Per-application dashboards — uptime, latency, errors, and logs in dedicated views.
• Metric aggregation — time-series collection across targets.
• Log collection — per-application log aggregation and query.
• Alerting — standard rule set per target with notification routing.
• Test integration — optional smoke, end-to-end, and lightweight load test folders.
• Isolated deployment — read-only network posture, safe to add and remove.

Who it is for

• Small and mid platform / SRE teams running several services on their own infrastructure.
• Operators who want a fully self-hosted observability posture for cost or sovereignty reasons.
• Zorost customers running our other platforms on private infrastructure.

Frequently asked questions

Will it modify our applications?

No. The stack is intentionally read-only and runs in its own network namespace. It cannot reach into the applications it monitors beyond standard monitoring interfaces.

Does it scale to many services?

Adding a new monitored application is a configuration change. Per-application dashboards and alert rules are first-class objects.

Is it open source?

Yes. The stack is configuration-driven and openly available so operators can read every component they are running.

See it in action

If your team is evaluating this category and you want to see how we think about the problem, we are happy to share a working demo, a technical briefing, or a proof-of-value engagement. Get in touch with Zorost Intelligence and tell us what you are trying to solve.

Part of the Zorost Platforms portfolio — production-grade AI products built on top of our agentic engineering and cloud-modernization practice.