SigNoz

SigNoz is an open source, full-stack observability platform that provides metrics, distributed traces, and logs in a single unified interface. Built with native support for OpenTelemetry, SigNoz offers teams a powerful self-hosted alternative to commercial observability tools like Datadog and New Relic, with no vendor lock-in and complete control over data storage and retention.

The OpenTelemetry-native architecture of SigNoz is one of its defining strengths. OpenTelemetry is the open standard for collecting telemetry data from applications and infrastructure, and SigNoz is built from the ground up to work with it. This means that applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry SDKs, which are available for virtually every popular programming language, can send their data to SigNoz without any proprietary SDK or agent. Teams that adopt SigNoz as their observability backend can switch to any other OpenTelemetry-compatible backend in the future without reinstrumenting their applications.

The distributed tracing capability in SigNoz allows teams to understand the full flow of requests through complex microservice architectures. Each request is represented as a trace composed of spans, where each span represents a unit of work in a service. SigNoz provides a flame graph visualization for exploring trace structure, a scatter plot for identifying latency outliers, service maps for understanding system topology, and the ability to navigate from a slow trace to the associated logs and metrics for root cause analysis.

Application performance monitoring (APM) in SigNoz provides service-level dashboards showing request rates, error rates, and latency percentiles (p50, p90, p99) for each service. These red (rate), errors, duration (RED) metrics give engineering teams an immediate signal when service health degrades. Automatic detection of slow database queries, external API calls, and message queue operations helps pinpoint performance bottlenecks quickly.

Log management in SigNoz supports ingesting structured and unstructured logs from any source via the OpenTelemetry Collector. The log explorer provides a familiar interface for searching, filtering, and analyzing log data with support for column-based queries, full-text search, and log-to-trace correlation. Logs can be parsed and enriched with structured attributes using processing pipelines in the collector.

The metrics system in SigNoz supports ingesting metrics in Prometheus format and OpenTelemetry protocol, allowing teams to use existing Prometheus instrumentation alongside OpenTelemetry-native metrics. Custom dashboards can be built using these metrics to visualize infrastructure health, business KPIs, and application performance indicators. Pre-built dashboard templates are available for common infrastructure components.

Alerting in SigNoz supports defining threshold-based and anomaly-based alerts on metrics, traces, and logs. Alerts can be routed to notification channels including Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, email, and webhooks. Alert history and incident timelines help teams track and understand recurring issues.

SigNoz is deployed using Docker Compose or Helm on Kubernetes and uses ClickHouse as its storage backend, which provides excellent query performance for both time-series metrics and high-cardinality trace and log data. SigNoz Cloud offers a managed version for teams that prefer not to manage infrastructure.