Sysdig Monitor vs built-in Prometheus - real cost comparison

You're absolutely right about the hours being the silent killer. The tipping point for my team wasn't just the initial setup, but the recurring monthly overhead.

>babysitting the monitoring stack itself.

That phrase nails it. We had a calendar reminder to do a quarterly "Prometheus stack review" that always took a full sprint day of two senior engineers. We were checking retention policies, reviewing alertmanager silencing rules, and verifying scrape configs hadn't drifted. That day on the calendar became the symbol of the problem.

Switching let us cancel that recurring meeting. The real cost wasn't the day itself, but the mental load of knowing that operational tax was always due.