Comparison Guide

pgHero vs MonPG: Point-in-Time Dashboard vs Continuous Monitoring

pgHero is one of the best answers ever written to the question "what is slow right now?" - a single open-source dashboard over pg_stat_statements that deploys in minutes. The question it does not try to answer is "what changed since Tuesday, and is it getting worse?" That is the line between a status page and a monitoring system, and it is the line this comparison walks.

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Strongest fit

  • You need history: query performance trended over weeks, so regressions are caught by comparison, not by memory.
  • You need alerting - pgHero has no built-in alerts, so something else has to wake you up.
  • Several engineers share triage and you want everyone looking at the same ranked evidence, not a screenshot in Slack.
  • You want index suggestions weighted by production risk, not just a list of unused and missing indexes.

Not ideal when

  • You want a free, self-hosted, zero-vendor dashboard you can deploy this afternoon - pgHero genuinely delivers that, and for a single small database it may be all you need.
  • Your stack is Rails and you like pgHero's native gem integration with the app you already operate.
  • You only check database health when something feels off, and a point-in-time view fits how you actually work.

Decision signals to evaluate

History: pgHero shows current pg_stat_statements state; MonPG stores trends, so 'this query is 4x slower than last week' is a query, not an investigation.
Alerting: pgHero ships none; MonPG alerts on regressions, locks, vacuum debt, and connection saturation.
Index advice: pgHero lists unused/missing indexes; MonPG adds rollout risk modeling and migration SQL with a rollback plan.
Operating cost: pgHero is free software you run and patch; MonPG is a paid service with the ops handled.
Scale: pgHero is per-database; MonPG gives one surface across all your instances and replicas.
Incident depth: when pgHero shows a slow query, your next step is manual EXPLAIN work; MonPG carries you into plan and lock context directly.

Related PostgreSQL pages

PostgreSQL Slow Query Monitoring

Catching regressions by trend, not by memory.

PostgreSQL Index Rollout

From index suggestion to production-safe DDL.

Self-Hosted PostgreSQL Monitoring

Operational patterns for self-managed instances.

FAQ

Is pgHero good enough for production?

For a single database with light traffic and an engineer who checks it regularly - honestly, yes. The failure mode is growth: more databases, more engineers, incidents at 3am with no alerting and no history. Teams usually outgrow pgHero at the first regression nobody noticed for a week.

Can I keep pgHero and add MonPG?

Yes. Both read from pg_stat_statements without conflict. Some teams keep pgHero as a quick local view for developers and use MonPG for alerting, history, and incident triage.

Why pay for monitoring when pgHero is free?

You are not paying for charts - you are paying for retention, alerting, regression detection, and rollout safety that pgHero deliberately does not include. If those gaps cost you one bad incident a quarter, the math usually closes quickly. If they never bite, keep pgHero.

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