When building a data-intensive platform, real operational visibility becomes necessary quickly. A core API might be fast, but if event consumers lag or the database strains, the system degrades.
The industry reflex is often to reach for a managed SaaS provider or immediately start instrumenting the codebase with OpenTelemetry. But for an early-to-mid-stage project, SaaS ingest pricing can rapidly drain a budget, and app-level instrumentation can be a distraction when basic infrastructure baselines do not yet exist.
A pragmatic, battle-tested standard provides a solution: a self-hosted stack using Prometheus, Grafana, and dedicated Exporters.
Here is a look at the architecture, the tradeoffs, and why this is the right "Phase 1" approach for scaling platforms.
Observing Infrastructure Directly
Before instrumenting application-level spans and traces, a platform first needs a bedrock of infrastructure visibility. By starting with the underlying state and event layers (PostgreSQL and Kafka), a decoupled pipeline for system health is established.
Omnismith relies on robust foundational infrastructure. This separation of concerns keeps the application fast and reliable, but it introduces operational complexity. If the database experiences heavy query load or if Kafka consumers fall behind, the platform's performance degrades.
By collecting metrics directly from the infrastructure itself using postgres-exporter and kafka-exporter, a baseline of operational health is established that complements future application-level telemetry.
Architecture and Extensibility
By combining Prometheus with dedicated infrastructure exporters, robust telemetry is achieved without adding latency to the primary request path or polluting the application domain.
+------------------+ +------------------+
| PostgreSQL | | Apache Kafka |
| (Database) | | (Event Bus) |
+------------------+ +------------------+
| |
v v
+------------------+ +------------------+
| Postgres | | Kafka |
| Exporter | | Exporter |
+------------------+ +------------------+
| |
| +------------------+ |
+---------> | Prometheus | <-----------+
| (Scrape & Alert) |
+------------------+
|
v
+------------------+
| Grafana |
| (Dashboards) |
+------------------+
Each component fulfills a specific operational boundary:
- Exporters: Run alongside the core infrastructure, exposing internal metrics (e.g., table sizes, partition counts, consumer group lag) over HTTP.
- Prometheus: Periodically scrapes these exporters, maintains time-series data, and evaluates recording rules to trigger alerts.
- Alerting & Visualization: Alerts are routed to communication channels via Grafana Alerting to avoid active dashboard monitoring. Grafana also queries Prometheus to provide unified, real-time visualization.
This design is highly extensible. As infrastructure complexity grows, additional metrics can be collected by simply provisioning new exporters and adding them as Prometheus scrape targets.
The TCO Tradeoff: Financial Efficiency vs. Maintenance
In the early and growth phases of a platform, infrastructure decisions require a balance between operational capability and financial discipline.
Deploying and managing a self-hosted observability stack rather than relying immediately on managed cloud SaaS providers yields two major advantages:
1. Direct Financial Efficiency
Managed monitoring solutions often carry steep pricing structures linked to ingested data volume.
While self-hosting requires engineering time to maintain, avoiding the steep data-ingest pricing drastically reduces direct cash burn in the early stages. Accepting the trade-off that self-hosting a stateful time-series database introduces its own maintenance burden (such as managing storage retention) is necessary. However, at current platform volumes, the financial savings vastly outweigh the operational overhead, directly extending runway.
2. Deep Platform Understanding
Operating complex distributed infrastructure hands-on builds essential domain expertise.
Configuring Prometheus scrape intervals, understanding exporter metrics, and provisioning Grafana dashboards provides deep visibility into low-level system mechanics. When the platform eventually scales to warrant managed cloud instances (such as AWS Managed Prometheus), the transition can be executed efficiently with an exact understanding of system requirements.
Conclusion
By monitoring the foundational infrastructure directly and operating an efficient self-hosted stack, the platform gains an extensible observability layer and significant cost savings during a critical growth phase. Application instrumentation is definitely next, but this infrastructure baseline had to come first.
