Mackerel
Server monitoring software
- Features
- Ease of use
- Ease of management
- Quality of support
- Affordability
- Market presence
Take the quiz to check if Mackerel and its alternatives fit your requirements.
¥2,180 (tax included) per month
Free TrialFree version
Small
Medium
Large
-
What is Mackerel
Mackerel is a cloud-based server monitoring service that collects host and OS metrics and supports alerting and dashboards. It targets operations and SRE teams that need monitoring for fleets of Linux/Windows servers and cloud instances. The product uses an agent-based model with role-based grouping and supports custom metrics and integrations via APIs and plugins.
Agent-based host monitoring
Mackerel provides a lightweight agent to collect common server metrics such as CPU, memory, disk, and network. This approach works well for monitoring traditional VMs and bare-metal hosts where infrastructure-level visibility is required. It also supports extending collection through plugins and custom metrics for application-specific signals.
Role and service organization
Mackerel organizes monitored hosts into services and roles, which helps teams manage monitoring at scale across environments. This structure supports applying alerts and views consistently to groups of servers rather than configuring each host individually. It is useful for teams that operate multiple applications with shared infrastructure patterns.
API and integration options
Mackerel exposes APIs and supports integrations for notifications and external tooling. Teams can automate host registration, metric submission, and alert workflows as part of infrastructure-as-code or CI/CD processes. This makes it easier to fit into existing operational processes compared with tools that rely mainly on manual configuration.
Limited full-stack observability
Mackerel focuses primarily on server and infrastructure monitoring rather than end-to-end observability across traces, logs, and application performance in one place. Organizations that need deep APM features may require additional products to cover distributed tracing and code-level diagnostics. This can increase toolchain complexity for application-centric monitoring programs.
Agent deployment required
Because Mackerel relies on an installed agent for most host metrics, teams must manage deployment, upgrades, and permissions across their server fleet. This can be challenging in highly locked-down environments or where agent installation is restricted. It may also add operational overhead compared with approaches that rely more heavily on managed integrations.
Smaller ecosystem footprint
Compared with larger, broadly adopted monitoring platforms, Mackerel has a smaller third-party integration and community ecosystem. Some niche integrations, prebuilt dashboards, or out-of-the-box content may be less available. Teams may need to invest more effort in custom plugins, API automation, or internal runbooks.
Plan & Pricing
| Plan | Price | Key features & notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | Up to 5 hosts (standard + micro combined); up to 500 metrics; 1-day metric retention; Free up to 5M spans; up to 20 external monitors free; 1 custom dashboard; unlimited users; email support and online docs. |
| Standard | ¥2,180 per standard-host/month (tax included); ¥660 per micro-host/month (tax included); ¥11 per metric/month (tax included); ¥330 per 1M spans (tax included) | 460 days data retention; higher limits for monitors and dashboards (can be relaxed on request); anomaly detection, cloud integrations (AWS/Azure/GCP); 2-week free trial provides Standard-plan feature access. Minimum monthly billing applies (see notes). |
Seller details
Hatena Co., Ltd.
Kyoto, Japan
2001
Public
https://mackerel.io/
https://x.com/mackerelio
https://www.linkedin.com/company/hatena/
