What is OpenObserve?
OpenObserve (O2) was created to solve the cost and complexity of running Elasticsearch or the full Prometheus/Loki/Tempo/Grafana stack. A single deployment ingests logs via OpenTelemetry, Fluentd, or direct API; metrics via Prometheus remote write or OTLP; traces via Jaeger or OTLP; and real-user monitoring via a JavaScript snippet - all stored in object storage (S3, GCS, MinIO, or local disk).
Read the full overview
The Rust implementation keeps memory usage dramatically lower than JVM-based alternatives. Benchmarks show storage costs 140x below Elasticsearch at equivalent query performance. The embedded SQL query engine supports complex aggregations without separate query infrastructure.
Unified observability: logs, metrics, traces, and RUM in one platform
Key capabilities
- Log ingestion and search - full-text and structured log search with saved views and alerts.
- Metrics - Prometheus-compatible metrics ingestion, storage, and dashboarding.
- Distributed tracing - Jaeger-compatible trace ingestion with service dependency maps.
- Real-user monitoring - frontend performance, errors, and session data from a single JS snippet.
- Dashboards and alerts - built-in dashboard editor and alert rules with webhook, email, and PagerDuty targets.
- LLM observability - native tracing for AI pipelines including prompt management and cost tracking.
The Grafana stack solves every observability use case but requires four separate systems, four separate retention policies, and four separate maintenance windows. Teams consistently underestimate the operational overhead. OpenObserve trades some ecosystem depth for radical simplicity: one binary, one storage backend, one query surface. For teams under 50 engineers or those moving fast, that simplicity compounds over time.
“Unified observability: logs, metrics, traces, and RUM in one platform”
Technical details
- Access
- Self-hosted
- Source model
- Open source
- Founded
- 2023
- Pricing model
- Open source
- API
- Available
- Website
- openobserve.ai ↗
- GitHub
- Source repository ↗
What to verify
Profile audiences: DevOps Engineers, Developers, System Administrators.
- Confirm current features, licensing and support terms.
- Validate deployment, data location and access control.
- Test integrations, exports and recovery workflows.
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