Praxium Labs ships this for Nepali clients — here is what works. Most Nepali production apps run blind. The team finds out about outages from customer complaints, errors live in browser consoles, and "is the site fast?" is answered by opening the site personally. The stack below ends that.
1. Uptime monitoring
- Uptime Kuma: open-source, self-hosted on a tiny VPS or alongside your existing stack. Free, fully featured, integrates with WhatsApp / Slack / email
- BetterStack (formerly Better Uptime): hosted, generous free tier (10 monitors), $24/mo for serious use. On-call rotation built in
- Cloudflare Health Checks: free if you are already on Cloudflare
- Pingdom / Statuspage: the enterprise-y options; expensive at small scale
2. Error tracking
- Sentry: the de-facto standard. Free tier covers ~5,000 errors / month — plenty for small Nepali apps. Excellent integration with Next.js, Django, FastAPI, mobile SDKs
- GlitchTip: open-source Sentry-compatible alternative. Self-host on the same VPS
- Datadog APM: includes error tracking but at higher price point
3. Metrics and dashboards
- Grafana Cloud (free tier): 10k metrics, 50 GB logs, 50 GB traces per month — enough for most Nepali SaaS
- Prometheus + Grafana self-hosted: the open-source standard, cheap to run on a small VPS
- BetterStack Logs / Metrics: simpler than Grafana for small teams; nice all-in-one experience
- Datadog: the gold standard; expensive at small scale ($15/host/mo entry)
4. Business KPI alerts
Operational metrics (CPU, memory) matter less than business signals. Set alerts on:
- Order rate drops below X / hour during business hours
- Payment failure rate above X%
- Customer-support ticket spike
- Revenue today < average × 0.5
- Newsletter signups stuck at 0
- Specific page returning 5xx errors
Logging
Centralised logs are non-optional for production debugging. Options:
- Self-hosted Loki + Grafana: open-source stack; ~NPR 2,000-5,000/mo at SME volumes
- BetterStack Logs: simple, $19/mo for 30 GB/mo
- Datadog Logs: nice ergonomics; pricey above 50 GB/mo
Alerting routing
WhatsApp for urgent alerts (works for the entire Nepali team). Slack for engineering-channel notifications. Email for daily/weekly digests. Always include: what broke, when it broke, link to the relevant graph / log. Never paged before noon for a non-critical issue — alert fatigue kills monitoring discipline faster than under-alerting.
The starting stack
For a Nepali startup adding observability for the first time: pick one of (Better Stack, Sentry, Datadog) and stop reading. Better Stack covers logs + uptime cheaply; Sentry is the gold standard for error tracking; Datadog is the all-in-one but expensive. Self-host Grafana + Prometheus + Loki only if your team has time to operate it; the bills you save by self-hosting often go right back into engineering hours. For broader DevOps context, see our cloud guide.
What to monitor first
- Uptime: external probes from outside your infrastructure
- Error rate: spikes in 5xx and uncaught exceptions
- Latency: p50, p95, p99 for key endpoints — averages hide pain
- Payment-flow success rate: business-critical — alert at < 95% short-window success
- Login / signup funnel: conversion break = ship-stopper
- Background-job queue depth: growing queue = approaching outage
- Disk / RAM / CPU saturation: classic infra signals; do not skip
Frequently asked questions
What's the minimum viable monitoring for a tiny Nepali SaaS?
Uptime Kuma (uptime), Sentry free tier (errors), Cloudflare Web Analytics (basic usage). Total cost: zero. Total setup: 90 minutes. Covers 80% of real issues.
When do I need APM (application performance monitoring)?
When your app has >5 services or >10 background-job types. APM's value comes from tracing requests across services. Below that complexity, simpler logs + Sentry breadcrumbs are usually enough.
How do I monitor Nepali-specific issues like payment-gateway outages?
Add gateway-specific health checks — a tiny script that creates a NPR 1 payment in UAT every 5 minutes and verifies status. If it fails, alert. This catches eSewa/Khalti API issues before customers do.
Should I monitor the user's real network performance?
Yes — real-user monitoring (RUM) shows actual Nepali-network performance from real users. Sentry includes basic web-vitals; Cloudflare Web Analytics has Core Web Vitals; specialist tools like SpeedCurve provide deeper insights.
What about SLOs / SLIs?
For Nepali SaaS scale, simple "is the home page returning 200 in <1s 99% of the time?" is enough to start. Formal SLO framework matters once you have multiple teams shipping against shared infrastructure.
How much should observability cost?
Rule of thumb: 5-10% of compute spend. Below that you are under-monitored; above 15% means too noisy or over-tooled.
PagerDuty or OpsGenie or Better Stack?
All three handle on-call rotation and escalation; pick the one your team will use. Better Stack is increasingly competitive on price for small Nepali teams.
Who can build this in Nepal?
Praxium Labs — Nepal's AI and automation consultancy, based in Lalitpur — designs and builds the systems described in this guide for Nepali businesses and for international teams hiring from Nepal. Start a project or see all services.