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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Axiom Has a Free API — Here's How to Build Observability Without the Datadog Bill

#axiom #observability #logging #api

A startup CTO told me: 'Our Datadog bill hit $3,000/month. We were a team of 5. We switched to Axiom — same insights, $0/month on the free tier.'

What Axiom Offers for Free

Axiom free tier:

  • 500 GB ingest/month — more than most paid tools
  • 30 day retention
  • Unlimited users
  • Log management, tracing, and analytics
  • APL (Axiom Processing Language) — powerful query language
  • Dashboards and alerts
  • OpenTelemetry native support
  • Integrations: Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, GitHub

Quick Start 

# Install CLI
brew install axiomhq/tap/axiom

# Login
axiom auth login

# Stream logs
echo '{"level":"info","message":"Hello Axiom"}' | axiom ingest my-dataset

# Query
axiom query 'my-dataset | where level == "error" | count'
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Ingest Logs (REST API) 

# Ingest JSON events
curl -X POST 'https://api.axiom.co/v1/datasets/my-logs/ingest' \
  -H 'Authorization: Bearer xaat_YOUR_API_TOKEN' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '[
    {"level": "info", "message": "User logged in", "userId": "123", "_time": "2026-03-29T10:00:00Z"},
    {"level": "error", "message": "Payment failed", "userId": "456", "error": "insufficient_funds"}
  ]'
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Node.js SDK 

const { Axiom } = require('@axiomhq/js');

const axiom = new Axiom({ token: process.env.AXIOM_TOKEN });

// Ingest events
axiom.ingest('web-logs', [
  { level: 'info', path: '/api/users', method: 'GET', duration: 45, status: 200 },
  { level: 'warn', path: '/api/orders', method: 'POST', duration: 2300, status: 500, error: 'timeout' }
]);

await axiom.flush();

// Query
const result = await axiom.query(`
  ['web-logs']
  | where level == 'error'
  | summarize count() by bin(_time, 1h), path
  | order by _time desc
`);

console.log(result.tables[0].events);
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Express Middleware 

const { Axiom } = require('@axiomhq/js');
const axiom = new Axiom({ token: process.env.AXIOM_TOKEN });

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  const start = Date.now();

  res.on('finish', () => {
    axiom.ingest('api-logs', [{
      method: req.method,
      path: req.path,
      status: res.statusCode,
      duration: Date.now() - start,
      userAgent: req.get('user-agent'),
      ip: req.ip,
      _time: new Date().toISOString()
    }]);
  });

  next();
});
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APL Queries (Powerful Analytics) 

// Error rate by endpoint
['api-logs']
| where _time > ago(24h)
| summarize total = count(), errors = countif(status >= 500) by path
| extend error_rate = round(100.0 * errors / total, 2)
| order by error_rate desc

// P95 latency by hour
['api-logs']
| where _time > ago(7d)
| summarize p95 = percentile(duration, 95) by bin(_time, 1h)

// Top users by request volume
['api-logs']
| where _time > ago(1d)
| summarize requests = count() by userId
| top 10 by requests
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Vercel Integration (Zero Config) 

# Install Vercel integration from Axiom dashboard
# All Vercel logs automatically flow to Axiom
# Query them:
# ['vercel'] | where level == 'error' | take 10
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Why Axiom Over Datadog/New Relic

Axiom Datadog
500 GB free 1 day retention free
Simple pricing Complex per-host/per-metric
APL query language DQL
OpenTelemetry native Custom agent
No surprise bills Bill shock common

Need to monitor your scraping infrastructure? Check out my web scraping actors on Apify — managed scrapers with built-in logging.

Need custom observability? Email me at spinov001@gmail.com.

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