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Developer ToolsAlternative to DynatraceAlternative to New RelicAlternative to DatadogAlternative to Splunk

SigNoz

Open-source observability platform: metrics, traces, and logs. Alternative to DataDog and New Relic.

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LicenseApache-2.0
GitHub stars31.9k
Last commit1 weeks ago
Tags7 topics
ClickhouseTracingObservabilityOpentelemetryLogsMetricsApm
Overview

Why consider SigNoz?

SigNoz is an open-source APM and observability platform natively powered by OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse. It monitors metrics, traces, and logs in a unified dashboard.

Guided learning

Learn SigNoz by building

Practical setup notes, real use cases, and copy-ready examples in one focused guide.

3 min read 11 sections
In this guide11 sections

What is SigNoz?

SigNoz is an open-source, full-stack application performance monitoring (APM) and observability platform natively built on the OpenTelemetry standard and ClickHouse columnar database. It operates as an open-source, cost-effective alternative to commercial observability SaaS giants like DataDog, New Relic, and Dynatrace.

SigNoz unites the three pillars of modern observability—metrics, distributed traces, and structured logs—into a single high-performance dashboard. It enables engineering teams to identify application bottlenecks, trace latency across microservices, query high-cardinality logs, and receive real-time alerting with zero vendor lock-in.

Who Is It For?

  • DevOps & Site Reliability Engineers (SREs): Monitoring application service health, p99 latency percentiles, and infrastructure error rates across Kubernetes clusters.
  • Backend Developers: Diagnosing slow database queries, tracing distributed HTTP/gRPC requests across microservices, and debugging runtime exceptions.
  • Platform Engineering Teams: Slashing cloud observability bills by deploying an on-premises ClickHouse telemetry backend.

Key Features

  • Native OpenTelemetry (OTel) instrumentation across Python, Node.js, Java, Go, Ruby, Rust, and .NET.
  • Unified 3-in-1 telemetry view: Seamlessly correlate distributed traces, application logs, and system metrics.
  • High-performance columnar storage powered by ClickHouse: Execute blazing-fast aggregation queries over billions of log lines.
  • Detailed flame graphs and Gantt chart waterfall spans for visualizing microservice bottlenecks and DB queries.
  • Flexible alerting rule engine with integration for PagerDuty, Slack, Opsgenie, and Webhooks.

Deploying SigNoz with Docker Compose

bash
1# 1. Clone the official SigNoz deployment repository
2git clone -b main https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz.git
3cd signoz/deploy/docker
4
5# 2. Start the SigNoz ClickHouse, Query Service, and Frontend stack
6docker compose -f docker-compose.yaml up -d

Access the SigNoz web dashboard at http://localhost:3301 in your browser to create your initial administrator account.

Instrumenting a Node.js Application with OpenTelemetry

bash
1npm install --save @opentelemetry/sdk-node @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node

Run your Node.js application with OTel environment variables pointing to your SigNoz collector:

bash
1export OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT="http://localhost:4318"
2export OTEL_SERVICE_NAME="my-express-api"
3node -r @opentelemetry/auto-instrumentations-node/register app.js

Practical Use Cases

1. Root-Cause Latency Diagnosis

An engineer investigates a 2-second p99 latency spike on a checkout API endpoint; SigNoz flame graphs reveal an unindexed SQL query taking 1.8s inside the payment microservice.

2. High-Cardinality Distributed Log Searching

A DevOps team filters 50 million log events by customer_id and http_status=500, aggregating results in under 200 milliseconds using ClickHouse.

3. Automated Error Budget & SLO Alerts

A team configures alerts when the 5-minute error rate of the authentication service exceeds 0.1%, automatically dispatching an incident page to on-call engineers.

Troubleshooting and Limitations

  • ClickHouse Memory Allocation: ClickHouse delivers extreme query performance by utilizing available RAM; ensure the host server has at least 4–8 GB of dedicated RAM for production ingestion.
  • OpenTelemetry Ingest Ports: SigNoz OTel collector listens on port 4317 (OTLP gRPC) and 4318 (OTLP HTTP); verify these ports are reachable from client application networks.

Official Resources

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SigNoz FAQs

SigNoz is listed as a Developer Tools tool on TiloBox. Review the overview, features, and official documentation on this page to decide whether it solves your specific workflow.

Start with the project's GitHub repository and official website for supported installation and deployment instructions. Test the setup with representative data or a small project before rolling it out more widely.

SigNoz is listed under the Apache-2.0 license. Read the complete license text and the project's notices before using, modifying, or distributing the software.

Production readiness depends on your requirements. Review maintenance activity, security practices, documentation, backup and upgrade procedures, and compatibility with your stack; then validate it in a non-production environment.

SigNoz is listed as an alternative to Dynatrace. Compare the core workflow, deployment model, integrations, and licensing against your must-have requirements before switching.