Monitoring & Observability

Application monitoring, logging, and observability platforms for tracking system performance, managing alerts, and debugging issues. European monitoring tools process your application logs and metrics within EU infrastructure, protecting the personal data that inevitably appears in log streams.

What to Look For

Application performance monitoring
Log management
Alerting
Distributed tracing
Uptime monitoring

GDPR Considerations

Application logs and monitoring data are a frequently overlooked source of personal data. Error logs contain user email addresses, request logs include IP addresses and session tokens, database query logs expose customer records, and stack traces may reveal API keys and user identifiers. Monitoring platforms ingest massive volumes of this data continuously, making them one of the largest personal data processing activities in any technology organisation. When your monitoring platform is operated by a US company like Datadog or New Relic, every log line, trace, and metric containing personal data is processed on US infrastructure. European monitoring platforms keep your observability data within the EU, ensuring that the personal data flowing through your logs and metrics is protected by GDPR. This is especially important because log data is often retained for weeks or months for debugging purposes, creating a persistent store of personal data that requires GDPR-compliant retention and deletion policies.

How to Choose

With 3 European monitoring & observability options available, choosing the right one depends on your priorities. Here's a quick guide:

€

On a budget or just exploring

Grafana Labs, Checkly, Better Stack offer free tiers

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Need code transparency or self-hosting

Grafana Labs, Checkly are open source

European Monitoring & Observability Software

Grafana Labs screenshot
Grafana Labs logo

Grafana Labs

Open source observability platform for metrics, logs, and traces

Free
Stockholm
🇸🇪🇪🇺
GDPRSOC 2DPA
Open Source
Checkly screenshot
Checkly logo

Checkly

Developer-first synthetic monitoring and testing platform from Europe

Free
Berlin
🇩🇪🇪🇺
GDPRDPA
Open Source
Better Stack screenshot
Better Stack logo

Better Stack

Czech all-in-one observability platform for uptime, logs, and incidents

Free
Prague
🇨🇿🇪🇺
GDPRDPA

Compare Monitoring & Observability Products

Grafana Labs vs Checkly
Grafana Labs vs Better Stack
Checkly vs Better Stack

Monitoring & Observability by Country

Monitoring & Observability in Germany

🇩🇪 Browse monitoring & observability hosted in Germany

Looking for US alternatives?

Datadog alternatives

European alternatives to Datadog
Splunk alternatives

European alternatives to Splunk
PagerDuty alternatives

European alternatives to PagerDuty

Monitoring & Observability — Frequently Asked Questions

Do application logs really contain personal data under GDPR?
Almost always, yes. Application logs routinely contain IP addresses (personal data under GDPR), user email addresses in error messages, session tokens and authentication events linked to specific users, API request bodies with customer-submitted data, database query logs exposing customer records, and user agent strings. Even seemingly innocuous access logs contain IP addresses, timestamps, and URL paths that can reveal individual browsing behaviour. Monitoring platforms ingest millions of these log lines daily. With a US-based monitoring provider, this continuous stream of personal data is processed outside the EU for every second your application runs.
Can European monitoring tools handle the scale of Datadog or New Relic?
European monitoring platforms have matured significantly in terms of scale. Open-source solutions like Grafana (with Loki for logs and Prometheus for metrics) can handle enterprise-scale observability when self-hosted on EU infrastructure. Managed European alternatives offer log ingestion rates and retention capacities suitable for large production environments. While Datadog's breadth of integrations and its unified platform approach may be wider, the core monitoring capabilities of log aggregation, metrics dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing are well-served by European alternatives. For most engineering teams, the functional trade-off is minimal.
How should we handle log retention under GDPR?
GDPR's data minimization principle requires that personal data is not kept longer than necessary. For application logs, this means you should define clear retention periods based on your debugging and compliance needs, typically 30 to 90 days for operational logs. European monitoring platforms offer configurable retention policies that automatically delete logs after the defined period. You should also consider log scrubbing: automatically redacting personal data like email addresses and IP addresses from log lines at ingestion time. European providers increasingly offer built-in scrubbing rules to remove common PII patterns before logs are stored.
See only GDPR-compliant Monitoring & Observability