Better Stack

Better Stack specialist. Better Stack consolidates uptime monitoring, log aggregation, alerting, on-call scheduling, and branded status pages into a single platform. The strongest value proposition for teams wanting to reduce vendor count.

When to Use

• Consolidating uptime monitoring + alerting + on-call + status pages into one platform
• Configuring Better Stack monitors and on-call policies via Terraform
• Setting up branded status pages with subscriber management
• Using the Better Stack MCP server for AI-assisted incident operations
• Teams evaluating alternatives to Datadog + PagerDuty as a cost-reduction strategy
• Startups and mid-market companies (up to ~500 engineers) looking for developer-friendly tooling

Platform Context

Unique value: Better Stack bundles five separate products that most teams purchase independently:

1. Uptime monitoring (HTTP, TCP, keyword, SSL, DNS, cron)
2. Log aggregation + search (Loki-compatible API)
3. Alerting and on-call scheduling
4. Status pages (branded, custom domain, custom CSS, subscriber email/SMS)
5. AI-assisted postmortem drafting

Best fit for: Startups and mid-market companies. Strong adoption in companies that currently use Pingdom + PagerDuty + Statuspage.io + a log aggregator as separate tools.

MCP status: Official MCP server announced in Changelog #12. Covers incidents, on-call, log queries, and postmortem drafting.

Pricing: Free tier available (limited monitors). Paid tiers based on monitor count and user seats.

Modes

monitor

Configure uptime monitors and alerting rules. See references/monitors-and-alerting.md.

Monitor types:

• status — HTTP/HTTPS availability check (2xx = up, other = down)
• expected_status_codes — Check for specific HTTP status codes
• keyword — Confirm a keyword appears/does not appear in response body
• keyword_absence — Confirm a keyword is absent
• ping — ICMP ping
• tcp — TCP port check
• dns — DNS resolution check
• ssl — SSL certificate expiry check
• cron — Cron job heartbeat (alert if job does not check in)

on-call

Configure on-call schedules and escalation policies. See references/monitors-and-alerting.md for policy examples.

status-page

Configure branded status pages with subscriber management, custom domains, and component grouping. See references/status-pages.md.

terraform

Manage Better Stack configuration as code. See references/terraform-provider.md for complete resource examples including:

• betterstack_monitor
• betterstack_monitor_group
• betterstack_on_call_calendar
• betterstack_escalation_policy
• betterstack_status_page
• betterstack_status_page_section
• betterstack_status_page_resource

mcp

Use the Better Stack MCP server for AI-driven operations. See references/mcp-usage.md (within monitors-and-alerting.md).

Quick Start (Terraform)

terraform {
  required_providers {
    betterstack = {
      source  = "BetterStackHQ/better-uptime"
      version = "~> 0.6"
    }
  }
}

provider "betterstack" {
  api_token = var.better_stack_api_token
}

# Basic HTTP monitor
resource "betterstack_monitor" "api_health" {
  monitor_type = "status"
  url          = "https://api.example.com/healthz"
  name         = "API Health Check"
  check_frequency = 60  # seconds
  regions = ["us", "eu", "ap"]

  escalation_policy_id = betterstack_escalation_policy.default.id
}

References

• references/terraform-provider.md — Complete Terraform resource examples
• references/monitors-and-alerting.md — Monitor types, on-call policies, MCP usage
• references/status-pages.md — Status page configuration and subscriber management