Table of Contents
Great systems are not just built. They are monitored.
MetricFire is a managed observability platform that helps teams monitor production systems with clean dashboards and actionable alerts. Delivering signal, not noise. Without the operational burden of self-hosting.
Introduction
Monitoring performance of Heroku applications helps improve user experience.
This blog post covers Heroku monitoring add-ons and explores why Hosted Graphite is the best choice in 2026. We'll discuss the benefits and setup process of the Hosted Graphite add-on. We'll also discuss future trends in Heroku monitoring.
Why Heroku Monitoring is Important
Monitoring your Heroku applications gives you real visibility into how your app performs in production and helps you catch problems before they impact users. Heroku’s built-in Metrics dashboard shows key application metrics like response times, throughput, error rates, and dyno resource usage (CPU, memory), but that view is short-term and meant for quick diagnostics. To truly understand performance trends, correlate metrics with logs and alerts, and spot issues like dyno memory spikes, database load increases, or routing problems, you need to capture and retain these signals over time and integrate them with an observability tool.
Heroku’s newer telemetry services now support forwarding trace, metrics, and logs (including OpenTelemetry-compatible streams) to external monitoring and alerting services, making it easier to diagnose root causes and maintain performance as your app scales.
Overview of Heroku Monitoring Add-ons
Heroku’s add-on ecosystem lets you bolt on fully managed monitoring, logging, and observability services directly to your applications from the Heroku Elements Marketplace. While there are several good options for tracking uptime, logs, and metrics, the portfolio of true observability add-ons has narrowed. For example, legacy tools like Librato have been sunsetted and teams now needing reliable replacements.
Among the current monitoring add-ons, Hosted Graphite stands out as a flexible and cost-effective option that collects Heroku metrics (dyno CPU/memory, Postgres, Redis, router stats, etc.) via log drains and presents them with customizable dashboards and alerts without the complexity of heavyweight platforms. In contrast, general-purpose observability platforms like New Relic can provide deep full-stack visibility but can be expensive and overwhelming for teams who primarily need straightforward Heroku performance insights, and uptime-focused tools like Pingdom cover availability checks but often lack richer metric analytics. This means teams choosing monitoring add-ons today are balancing simplicity and cost against the breadth of features they may not fully use.
Benefits of Using Hosted Graphite for Heroku Monitoring
Hosted Graphite gives Heroku teams flexible visibility without the complexity of heavyweight observability platforms. Out of the box, it supports options for aggregation of Heroku metrics across routers, hosts, dynos, and processes, making it easy to understand performance at both the platform and application level. Teams can break metrics down by individual app paths and endpoints, helping pinpoint slow routes, error-prone requests, or resource-heavy workloads. These metrics are presented through Hosted Grafana dashboards that let you visualize trends over time, compare deploys, and quickly identify bottlenecks.
Beyond Heroku’s native telemetry, Hosted Graphite also offers a public metrics ingestion endpoint, allowing teams to push custom application metrics as well as metrics from external systems like AWS, GCP, or other cloud services into a single monitoring platform. This makes it easier to correlate Heroku performance with background jobs, third-party dependencies, or infrastructure outside of Heroku. Combined with flexible alerting and integrations with notification tools like Slack and PagerDuty, Hosted Graphite helps teams stay proactive without overwhelming them with noise or complex configuration.
How to Set Up Hosted Graphite for Heroku Monitoring
When it comes to monitoring your Heroku applications, having a reliable and efficient tool is crucial. Hosted Graphite is one such tool that has gained popularity among developers and DevOps teams due to its robust features and ease of use. In this section, we will explore how to Hosted Graphite is a tool that has gained popularity among developers. Integrating Hosted Graphite with Heroku is straightforward.
First, enable the Marketplace Add-on or sign up for a dedicated Hosted Graphite account and obtain your API key. In your Heroku dashboard, navigate to your application settings and add the Hosted Graphite add-on. Adding the add-on will automatically configure your application to send metrics data to Hosted Graphite.
With the Hosted Graphite Add-on, metrics automatically flow into your account via your app's log drains. You can also configure your application to send relevant metrics to Hosted Graphite. To do this, add the necessary code snippets or libraries to your application's codebase. Hosted Graphite supports various programming languages and provides detailed documentation on instrumenting your code accordingly.
Once your application is sending metrics to Hosted Graphite, you get powerful visualization and alerting capabilities. Hosted Graphite allows you to create custom dashboards that provide real-time insights into your application's performance and server health. You can easily track important metrics such as response times, error rates, and resource utilization.
Comparing Monitoring Add-on Pricing
Pricing is a major consideration when choosing a Heroku monitoring add-on, especially as applications scale. Many popular observability platforms charge based on hosts, users, traces, or feature tiers, which can quickly become expensive and difficult to predict. Tools like New Relic or full-stack observability suites often require higher minimum commitments and additional configuration to unlock the features teams actually need.
Hosted Graphite takes a more straightforward approach. Plans start at just $19 per month, with transparent pricing based on metrics volume and retention rather than complex licensing models. This makes it easy for teams to start small, control costs, and scale monitoring alongside their applications without surprise fees. For Heroku users who want powerful metrics, dashboards, and alerting without paying enterprise-level prices or managing unnecessary features, Hosted Graphite offers a clear and cost-effective alternative.
Future Trends in Heroku Monitoring
Heroku’s approach to monitoring continues to evolve as the platform modernizes its underlying infrastructure. Recent platform updates, including the rollout of Fir and expanded support for OpenTelemetry, signal a move toward standardized telemetry for logs, metrics, and traces. This direction makes it easier for teams to export Heroku telemetry to external tools and adopt observability practices that work across multiple environments (not just Heroku).
At the same time, Heroku monitoring remains primarily metrics-driven, especially for teams focused on performance, reliability, and cost control. Tools like Hosted Graphite continue to adapt alongside these changes by expanding support for new data sources as the Heroku platform evolves. As new Heroku telemetry capabilities are introduced, monitoring tools like HG that emphasize openness and extensibility will be best positioned to keep pace with how teams observe and operate their applications.
Conclusion
Heroku makes it easy to deploy and run applications, but keeping them healthy in production still requires good visibility. As Heroku continues to improve its native telemetry and monitoring capabilities, teams increasingly rely on add-ons to retain data, create dashboards, and respond to issues before users notice them.
Hosted Graphite offers a straightforward and affordable way to monitor Heroku applications. It focuses on clear metrics, flexible dashboards, and reliable alerts without the cost or complexity of larger observability platforms. With simple setup and transparent pricing, Hosted Graphite gives teams the insight they need today while continuing to evolve alongside the Heroku platform.
Check out the Heroku Hosted Graphite Add-on, and see if it's the right tool for you!
