Mezmo (formerly LogDNA) is telemetry pipelines plus AURA, an open-source SRE agent harness you run yourself. That is not a mechanic for a sick VPS. Tink installs in one command, watches the Linux server, explains what is wrong, and helps you fix it.
Accidental sysadmins land on Mezmo because LogDNA was the log box and AURA now says “agentic SRE.” Then the disk fills, nginx dies, and the pipeline is quiet — nothing was shipped, so the harness has no context.
Tink is the other job: detect the issue on the machine, say why it happened in plain English, propose the command, and run it only after you approve. Keep Mezmo if you already operate telemetry pipelines. Use Tink if you run Linux servers and want a mechanic.
| Feature | Tink | Mezmo |
|---|---|---|
| Setup time | 30 seconds (one curl | sh command) | Hours to days — ship logs into Mezmo pipelines, then stand up AURA on your own infrastructure |
| What you get | Working monitoring, diagnosis, and approved fixes | Telemetry pipelines plus an open-source SRE agent harness. The VPS is still your problem until context arrives |
| Pricing | Free (Scout) / $9 / $29 per machine per month | Pipeline volume plus the cost of hosting AURA — ingest and infra, not a flat machine fee |
| Hidden costs | None — fully managed | Pipeline rules, retention, agent hosting, and a second loop for disk, nginx, certs, and restarts |
| Monitoring approach | Agent on the server — CPU, disk, services, logs, certs, ports | In-stream telemetry. Mezmo does not watch a quiet disk or a dead unit unless a pipeline saw it |
| Configuration | None after install — heuristics and AI | Sources, pipelines, routing, and the AURA harness on your metal or cluster |
| Plain-English diagnosis | Yes — AI explains root cause, impact, and fix | AURA can reason over piped context — nothing in the stream, nothing to say about the box |
| Fix execution | Proposes and executes approved commands with an audit trail | An agent harness is not a one-command nginx restart with Tink's audit trail |
| Alerting | Built-in across 8 channels | Pipeline and log alerts — host health is extra unless you wired it |
| Predictive alerts | Yes — disk fills in ~6 days, memory and CPU trends | Not a Mezmo pipeline job — a stream does not forecast a quiet disk |
| SSH brute-force detection | Built-in — parses auth.log every scan | Only if auth.log is in the pipeline and someone wrote the rule |
| Machine offline detection | Agent presence monitoring with multi-channel alerts | Silence in the pipeline if the shipper dies — if you built a deadman check |
| Public status page | Shareable URL with 90-day history | Internal telemetry views — customer status is extra work |
| Weekly fleet digest | Automated Monday digest + daily brief when issues are open | Pipeline dashboards — not a plain-English fleet narrative |
| On-call tracking | Built-in /oncall command + incident acknowledgment | Not included — wire Mezmo into PagerDuty or another incident tool |
| Conversation interface | Telegram, WhatsApp, web dashboard, CLI | Mezmo UI plus AURA. No mechanic you text when disk filled |
| Learning curve | None — works after install | High — LogDNA-era pipelines plus an SRE harness you operate |
| Best for | Freelancers, small teams, accidental sysadmins (1-50 Linux servers) | SRE teams that already run telemetry pipelines and want an agent harness on their own infra |
Keep Mezmo when you already want that exact job:
An agent harness is in every SRE blog post. A working ops loop for five Linux boxes is not:
For a 5-server team, Tink Mechanic at $45/month is cheaper than pipeline volume plus hosting AURA, and every scan includes a diagnosis a quiet telemetry stream will not type.
No pipeline homework. No silent host. One command install.
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