Your network, your data, your call — but the right answer depends on where your users actually are.
The short version
- Self-hosting keeps your monitoring data on your own systems and, depending on how you set it up, can run without relying on outside services.
- Cloud-based tools, by contrast, can monitor users who are away from your network, something self-hosting struggles to do.
- No single axis decides this.
01The case for running it yourself
Running monitoring in-house means the data stays on hardware you control, and a well-configured setup can work with few or no external dependencies. Pi-hole or a Squid proxy on pfSense/OPNsense can log every DNS query and HTTP request your network makes; ntopng turns NetFlow or sFlow exports from your switches and routers into per-user, per-application traffic breakdowns; LibreNMS and PRTG pull SNMP counters from every interface on the estate. Nothing leaves the building unless you choose to send it somewhere.
That data-residency guarantee matters in regulated environments — healthcare, finance, legal — where feeding DNS logs or flow records to a third-party cloud service may need a data-processing agreement, a privacy review, or both. Self-hosting sidesteps that conversation entirely. It also sidesteps per-seat or per-query pricing: once the hardware runs, the marginal cost of monitoring another device is essentially zero.
The honest cost is operational. Someone has to install, update, tune and back up these tools. Pi-hole is genuinely low-maintenance, but ntopng at any real scale, or PRTG managing hundreds of sensors, demands real attention. Disk fills up; NetFlow collector threads stall; dashboards drift out of date. If your team has the skills and cycles, that's fine. If you're a one-person IT department already stretched, "self-hosted" can quietly mean "broken and unmonitored."
Agentless designs help — Internet Access Monitor's entire lineage was built on parsing logs that already existed, touching no endpoint — but even log-based monitoring requires a working collection pipeline: syslog forwarding configured, retention set, access controlled. None of it runs itself.
02The case for cloud-delivered visibility
Where cloud-delivered tools earn their place is the gap self-hosting handles worst: users who aren't on your network. Remote workers, road warriors, branch offices on consumer broadband — none of them pass through your on-premises proxy or hit your local DNS resolver. A cloud DNS security service like NextDNS or Cisco Umbrella works by pointing the endpoint's resolver at a cloud anycast address, so DNS queries — and the usage visibility those queries provide — follow the user wherever they go. Netskope and similar CASB platforms go further, applying a lightweight agent or a cloud-hosted proxy to surface shadow IT and SaaS usage across every device on any connection.
Setup is fast. NextDNS for a small team can be running in under an hour; Umbrella deploys via MDM policy. There's no server to provision, no disk to fill, no collector to babysit. For an IT team that needs coverage now and has limited infrastructure bandwidth, that speed-to-insight is real.
The trade-offs are symmetrical to self-hosting. You are, by definition, routing DNS queries — and in CASB solutions, proxied traffic — through a third party's infrastructure. Your users' browsing metadata lives in someone else's data centre, governed by their retention policy and subject to their jurisdiction. For many organisations that's an acceptable and well-understood arrangement; for others it's a blocker. Cost scales with usage: enterprise Umbrella or Netskope licensing is not cheap, and even NextDNS's paid tier has query caps that large networks will hit.
03Picking your approach — and why hybrids are common
No single axis decides this. Think through four constraints:
Where are your users? If everyone is on-site, self-hosting covers them completely. Mixed or fully remote workforces push you toward cloud or hybrid.
What's your data-residency requirement? Regulated industries often need self-hosting, or a cloud provider with explicit regional data guarantees and a signed DPA.
What staff capacity do you have? Honest answer only. A tool you can't maintain gives you false confidence and eventual blind spots.
What's your budget shape? On-premises has higher upfront and ongoing operational cost; cloud has predictable subscription cost that rises with scale.
Most real networks land on a hybrid: a self-hosted NetFlow analyser or Pi-hole for LAN visibility and historical log retention, plus a cloud DNS layer — NextDNS, or Umbrella if the budget allows — for roaming device coverage and a second data point on what the LAN resolver is seeing. The two layers complement each other neatly, and neither requires reading packet payloads to do its job. Metadata and volumes, not content: that's the principle that keeps usage monitoring both effective and defensible.
