Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 1)

AI Has Made Building Monitoring Easy. It Hasn’t Made Owning It Any Easier.

A few months ago, I spoke to an engineering manager who proudly told me they had rebuilt their monitoring stack over a long weekend.

They’d used AI to scaffold synthetic checks. They’d generated alert logic with dynamic thresholds. They’d then wired everything into Slack and PagerDuty, and built a clean internal dashboard.

“It used to take us weeks to prototype something like this,” they said. “Now it’s basically instant.”

They weren’t wrong. AI has dramatically lowered the cost of creating software. And Monitoring tools are no exception.

You can now spin up uptime checks, stitch together observability pipelines, and stand up internal dashboards faster than most teams could schedule the kickoff meeting five years ago.

And that changes the psychology of buy vs build. If building is that easy, why buy at all?

But the challenge isn’t so much in the building, or the creation of monitoring. That, you might argue, is “easy”. However, owning monitoring is not.

The Weekend Build vs The 3am Incident

Internal monitoring often begins as a solution to friction. Perhaps the existing tool feels rigid and customisation feels limited; or pricing feels frustratingly high.

At first glance, and with AI assistance, the friction disappears. You can generate the logic you need; tune thresholds, and create integrations that fit your exact environment.

This can feel empowering as you’ve created a tool which is tailored to your own very specific needs. But monitoring doesn’t get tested during a quiet sprint planning session.

It gets tested at 3am when a region goes dark; DNS propagation behaves unpredictably, a third-party API starts returning inconsistent latency, or a cascading failure triggers five services at once.

In that instance the question has moved very quickly on from “can we build this?” to “Can we trust this?” And trust in monitoring isn’t built in a weekend. It’s built over years of:

• false positive tuning;
• edge-case discovery;
• infrastructure hardening;
• probe redundancy;
• alert fatigue reduction;
• incident retrospectives; and
• painful lessons learned under pressure.

Whilst AI may reduce development time, it doesn’t accelerate lived operational maturity.

AI Has Removed the Constraint.

There’s another shift happening that’s easy to miss. AI doesn’t just make it easier for you to build internal monitoring tools. It makes it easier for anyone to build monitoring products.

For years, one of the main barriers to entering the monitoring space was engineering velocity. Building distributed probes, managing alert pipelines, integrating with incident systems. These were – and arguably still are, if done properly – non-trivial undertakings.

That said, constraints are dissolving. We should expect a wave of AI-native monitoring startups. They may be lightweight, aggressively priced synthetic monitoring tools. We’ll see highly opinionated platforms targeting specific niches, and open-source forks iterating faster than ever.

From the outside, that looks like innovation. And to some extent, it is.
But more tools does not automatically mean better decisions. Monitoring is not like trying a new design tool or switching note-taking apps. It’s the system you depend on when everything else is failing.

When markets flood, features commoditise quickly. Dashboards look similar. Alert builders converge. “AI-powered insights” become ubiquitous. And when that happens, the differentiator is no longer features. It’s durability.

The Economics Nobody Talks About

Monitoring infrastructure is not cheap to operate. It requires distributed global probe networks, redundant infrastructure across regions, and continuous uptime of the monitoring system itself. Storage for historical performance data, ongoing maintenance, security reviews, and real support teams during real incidents.

Those costs don’t disappear because generating code is cheaper.
If anything, AI accelerates the rate at which new entrants can appear; which means pricing pressure increases. In new AI entrants, free tiers become more generous, low-cost plans become more aggressive, and “Unlimited” features appear earlier in product maturity cycles.

Against this backdrop, it’s worth asking as an engineering leader: Is this economically sustainable? If a monitoring platform costs $10 a month, what assumptions are embedded in that price? Venture funding? Artificially low infrastructure costs? A future pricing pivot? A strategy that depends on growth over durability?

Monitoring isn’t a consumer app, it’s an operational dependency, and its economics matter.

Creation Is Cheap. Ownership Is Expensive.

All of that said, the historical reasons companies chose to buy rather than build haven’t disappeared.

• Total cost of ownership still exists.
• Maintenance still accumulates.
• Technical debt still compounds.
• Security still requires discipline.
• Dependencies still require oversight.

Whilst AI compresses development time, it doesn’t eliminate:

• dependency management;
• vulnerability patching;
• alert signal tuning;
• SLA reporting integrity.
• knowledge transfer when engineers leave;
• support expectations during outages;
• documentation upkeep; or
• governance processes.

Monitoring, in particular, is unforgiving. If your CRM glitches, it’s frustrating. But if your monitoring system fails silently, you discover it during an outage. That asymmetry is why ownership matters.

Governance Is About to Become the Differentiator

As the monitoring ecosystem becomes more crowded, another question emerges. How are these tools built? In a world where AI-assisted development is increasingly common, do you know:

• How your monitoring vendor uses AI in development?
• What review processes exist around generated code?
• How dependencies are audited?
• How releases are validated?
• Who is accountable for long-term maintenance?

AI-assisted development isn’t inherently risky; but velocity without governance is. Monitoring platforms often hold:

• API keys;
• access to internal endpoints;
• incident escalation hooks; and
• visibility into production behaviour.

Trusting a monitoring provider requires confidence not just in features, but in discipline. Established platforms — whether StatusCake, Uptime Robot, or other long-standing providers — have spent years building operational maturity, distributed infrastructure, and sustainable business models.

That maturity is difficult to accelerate artificially. You can generate features quickly, but you can’t generate institutional memory.

The Strategic Shift in Buy vs Build

The traditional buy vs build conversation focused on cost and flexibility. The AI-era version should focus on ownership and accountability.

The real question is no longer:

“Can we build this ourselves?”

It should be:

“Do we want to own this layer of our infrastructure — including its risk, maintenance, and governance — or partner with someone whose core responsibility is to own it?”

For internal dashboards and experimental tools, building is increasingly viable. However for mission-critical monitoring infrastructure, the calculus changes.

Monitoring is the system you rely on when everything else breaks. That makes it different. So whilst AI makes building easier; it doesn’t make responsibility optional.

A Quiet but Important Reality

Software markets rarely collapse overnight. They fragment. They commoditise. They slowly separate durable providers from experimental ones.

As AI drives the cost of creation down, the monitoring space will likely see more entrants, more feature overlap, and more aggressive pricing. On the surface things will look superficially vibrant. But, the underlying question will remain simple:

Who do you trust to be there — and dependable — when it matters most?

Because monitoring isn’t about having the most modern dashboard. It’s about confidence during chaos.

In Part 2 of this 3 part series, we’ll explore what long-term ownership of monitoring actually entails; and why the hidden operational drag of building internally often surfaces much later than teams expect.

For now, one conclusion stands. Whilst AI has changed the cost of building, it hasn’t changed the cost of owning. And in monitoring, ownership is everything.