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And what would be a better alternative available outside of Google?

The decade old, open source, self hosted, debug it yourself standard for monitoring is collectd+graphite+grafana.

The equivalent easy to setup and use, with ALL the features working out of the box, SaaS standard is https://www.datadoghq.com/ or potentially Google Stack driver if you are on Google Cloud.

Plugging https://www.librato.com/ after reading an HN thread yesterday that DataDog pricing is insane [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15315028

Disclaimer: No relation to either org.

The thread you are linking to is a complete joke. The guy didn't see that the pricing was per host, even though it's written in big letters. His whole series of rant is ridiculous.

Stackdriver works with AWS.

https://cloud.google.com/monitoring/quickstart-aws

Stack Driver is a Google Cloud service, you need a Google account with billing to use it. It can gather metrics from hundreds of vendors, including AWS and Azure.

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