Table of Contents
Introduction
In 2025, nonprofits will rely heavily on technology to achieve their missions. They need reliable infrastructure to manage databases, run online campaigns, deliver critical services, and more. Limited resources make it difficult to maintain their systems efficiently.
Monitoring solutions provide visibility into system uptime, performance, security, etc. With monitoring, nonprofits can focus on their missions without worrying about infrastructure failures or other errors. But what do you need to look for in a monitoring solution? This article answers that question and compares some of the top monitoring options below.
Why do Nonprofits Need Monitoring?
Nonprofits face specific impediments that for-profit organizations do not have to worry about. They often operate under tight constraints because every dollar and minute counts. Downtime or system performance issues can have significant consequences, from missed donations during a campaign to delays in delivering essential services. Monitoring solutions allow nonprofits the ability to:
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Detect and address issues before they escalate.
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Optimize resource usage and reduce costs.
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Ensure compliance with data protection regulations.
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Build trust with stakeholders by ensuring reliable and efficient work for their causes.
Nonprofit Requirements for Monitoring
Nonprofits have unique requirements for observability. A successful solution must address these key demands:
Budget Friendly
Nonprofits need solutions that provide robust or custom features at an affordable price. Many nonprofits benefit from tools that offer tiered pricing with discounts, many integrations, and complex tools. Other nonprofits can't afford the necessary monitoring, so they rely on platforms with free versions with simple but useful features.
Easy to Use
Because nonprofits have limited technical staff, many need easy-to-use tools so non-technical team members can manage their observability. Many look for all-in-one monitoring solutions that are so simple that even tech novices can manage their observability tools.
24/7 Support
Unfortunately, downtime is unpredictable, so access to reliable, around-the-clock support is essential to resolve issues promptly.
Ideally, you want an expert team available 24/7 to help with any questions so you can relax and focus on your nonprofit's mission. This is a big reason many nonprofits choose hosted solutions over open-source tools.
Secure
Nonprofits handle sensitive data, including donor information and beneficiary details. If the nonprofit is a healthcare cause, it may also have limited access to medical data. Any monitoring solution must prioritize security and compliance with regulations such as GDPR or HIPAA.
Best Monitoring Solutions for Nonprofits in 2025
Here are some of the best monitoring tools for nonprofits in 2025:
MetricFire
MetricFire offers a powerful, cost-effective monitoring solution with Hosted Graphite and Hosted Grafana. Ease of use, fully custom dashboards, and scalability make MetricFire ideal for nonprofits of all sizes. MetricFire's alerting system ensures you know when an issue occurs and can troubleshoot quickly.
MetricFire is an excellent tool for nonprofits because we offer price points perfect for smaller nonprofits and tiers and allow huge organizations to scale up. If you are starting small, we have you covered. Many find that the integrations and special features our competitors offer are expensive and unnecessary for their use cases, where we provide a simple solution for what they need for half the price of other tools.
Site24x7
Site24x7 monitors APs automatically so you can focus on more important business workflows. However, we don't recommend this tool for beginners or non-technical staff. Installation can be tricky, and you want a one-click solution for organizations with limited bandwidth. Site 24x7 is challenging.
Datadog
Known for its comprehensive features, Datadog delivers application performance monitoring, log management, and cloud monitoring. It has many capabilities and features, but without the budget and time to set up interesting integrations, the price point doesn't justify this tool.
New Relic
New Relic's observability platform supports everything from infrastructure monitoring to application performance. Its free tier and nonprofit discounts make it a fair option for limited organizations. However, some customers have left New Relic because the price quickly escalated. This makes it challenging to scale, especially for fast-growing nonprofits.
AppDynamics
AppDynamics is a great performance monitoring tool. It enables nonprofits to ensure mission-critical applications function normally. Its real-time diagnostics and actionable insights help maximize operational efficiency.
Unfortunately, getting attention from AppDynamics as a small or medium-sized business can be difficult. They focus their resources on supporting their clients with larger use cases, and are more expensive than a smaller organization can afford.
Getting Started with MetricFire
MetricFire is a top choice for nonprofits and charitable organizations due to low costs, ease of use, and comprehensive features. To get started:
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Sign Up: Create an account here and explore the free trial to assess features like Hosted Grafana, many cloud integrations, alerts, free team members, and more!
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Integrate: Use MetricFire's integrations, such as Heroku, AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, etc., to connect your existing systems, databases, servers, or applications.
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Customize Dashboards: Build dashboards tailored to your nonprofit's needs using Hosted Grafana. With MetricFire, you also get numerous auto dashboards to help you dive in. You can get generic overview dashboards with zero effort and more detailed data visualization with more time.
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Set Alerts: Configure alerts to notify your team of potential issues and to quickly troubleshoot and solve problems before they become serious.
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Leverage Support: Utilize MetricFire's 24/7 support for assistance during setup and throughout your life as a customer. We'll help you create dashboards and alerts, invite team members, offer tips for data ingestion, and more!
Conclusion
Nonprofits need monitoring so they can maximize their impact. Monitoring gives charitable organizations system reliability, secure data, and resource optimization. Among the many excellent tools available in 2025, MetricFire is an excellent, cost-effective, easy-to-use option tailored to nonprofits' unique needs. Start your monitoring journey today and empower your organization to achieve more with technology.
