It depends where you are in the world. When I was working in Switzerland, most SaaS pricing were no-brainers for us. But since I work in Latin America for small companies with local costumers, all the different services and tools you might want to use, with prices targeted at "western" customers, much more quickly add up to the equivalent of having multiple people on staff full time.

Still it is often not worth to roll your own, so it is nice to have alternatives for different price points and company scales.

> It depends where you are in the world.

Exactly this. We operate in Eastern Europe with local clients, offering on-prem SaaS. If I added all my clients' servers on datadog it would very easily eat through our profit margins.

> Still it is often not worth to roll your own

I tried hard not to, but at at the end, after spending 1 week trying to setup netdata and failed, I decided not to spend another week trying to setup grafana/influx/prometheus (lot's of docs to go through), and just have some bash scripts send metrics on a $10 digital ocean node service that sends me emails/sms when something "looks bad" (eg. high cpu temperature, stopped docker containers, etc).

I gave up on aggregated logging for the time being, since I can just ssh on each server and check journal and docker logs if I need to (as long as the hard drives don't crash).

The trick with the Netdata agent is to try the install script if running into trouble.

Yeah, having looked at what the script does I decided to 'containerize' the agent, and that led to other issues like configuring email alerts etc.

I was already a week deep into looking at various options and had to deliver on basic metrics and alerting, so I figured a couple of bash scripts, that log into local files with log rotation, systemd, and a dump/memory only receiving end running on nodejs for the alerts would be much faster and easier to maintain.

So far so good.

Tangent: what's the difference between on-prem SaaS and just "software"?

I guess it refers to them servicing (updating, reacting to downtime, etc.) the software, while it being deployed on premise? In contrast to the clients IT department doing so.

Yes that's right.

We provide both the hardware and the software. Our clients are pretty small, with no IT staff, and no technical expertise.

it used to be called "private cloud", wasn't it?

If you're in an established company making money - yes. If you're bootstrapping a service and counting on $50 total monthly cost while initial users are signing up - no.