SigNoz
Open-source APM — metrics, traces, and logs in one OpenTelemetry-native platform, a self-hosted Datadog alternative.
About
SigNoz is the leading open-source observability platform: a single application for APM, distributed tracing, log management, infrastructure monitoring, and exception tracking, built natively on OpenTelemetry and backed by ClickHouse for fast analytical queries. Instrument once with standard OTel SDKs and get latency percentiles, flame-graph traces, correlated logs, and dashboards without per-host pricing. The repo carries 20,000+ GitHub stars, it deploys via Docker Compose or Kubernetes, and a managed cloud tier exists for teams that don't want to self-host. Recent releases added LLM and AI observability for tracing prompts, tokens, and RAG pipelines.
The honest picture: self-hosting is real operational work — the Docker Compose stack runs ClickHouse, Kafka, the query service, and the OTel collector, which is heavy for small teams or a single VPS. Licensing is dual (MIT frontend, AGPL-style backend terms), so read the LICENSE before commercial deployment. And while the feature set is broad, Datadog's ecosystem of 700+ integrations still dwarfs it.
What it can do
- Unified APM, traces, logs, metrics, and exceptions in one UI
- OpenTelemetry-native ingestion — vendor-neutral instrumentation
- ClickHouse-backed storage for fast analytical queries
- Query Builder, PromQL, and ClickHouse SQL dashboarding
- Threshold and anomaly alerting with Slack/PagerDuty routing
- LLM observability for prompts, tokens, latency, and cost
Setup
Self-host: clone the SigNoz repo, run docker compose up in deploy/docker, open :3301 and set an admin account. Or sign up for SigNoz Cloud. Point OTel SDKs at the collector endpoint.
Prerequisites
Docker (self-host) or a SigNoz Cloud account; OpenTelemetry-instrumented services.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: Verified via vendor site/docs/GitHub and reputable coverage, wave 53; Trending score 85/100 from researcher assessment.
★ 30,000 GitHub stars
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.