SigNoz - Open-Source Alternative to DataDog

If you’re looking for the best open-source alternative to Datadog, Self-Hosted SigNoz provides an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that you can run on your own infrastructure.

One reason for building the SigNoz open-source project was the lack of a robust, one-stop observability solution that provided a polished experience similar to SaaS tools such as Datadog. We also wanted a tool built on OpenTelemetry, with no proprietary agents in your application code, so that you never get locked in with a vendor.

SigNoz has been built on OpenTelemetry (OTel) from day one and uses OTel data across the product, enabling deep correlation and a faster debugging experience. Teams moving from Datadog can use our dashboard migration tool to translate exported dashboards, then migrate their telemetry and workflows in stages.

The issues with Datadog and why SigNoz

For many teams, the first problem with Datadog is unpredictable billing. That problem becomes harder to escape when instrumentation depends on a proprietary agent and there is no self-hosted deployment option. Let’s look at these issues in detail.

Complex and Unpredictable billing practices

The core of the confusion with Datadog's pricing lies in its multi-dimensional, usage-based model. You're not just paying for one thing; you're charged across various products, each with its own pricing metric. This can lead to unpredictable bills that are difficult to forecast and control.

Many users who migrated from Datadog to SigNoz came to us after receiving bills they did not expect.

Host-based pricing, special pricing for custom metrics, and paying twice for logs through ingestion and indexing are some of the common issues with Datadog billing. With Self-Hosted SigNoz Community Edition, there is no SigNoz license fee, per-host fee, or per-user fee; you pay for and operate the infrastructure. If you want a managed experience, SigNoz Cloud uses simple, usage-based pricing. Some highlights:

• Simple usage-based pricing: $0.30 per GB for ingested logs or traces, $0.10 per million samples for metrics. Use our cost estimator to estimate your monthly bill.
• No special pricing for custom metrics: Datadog can bill metrics outside its standard integrations as custom metrics, with allowances and overages based on the plan or contract. SigNoz Cloud prices all metric samples the same way, so you do not have to classify application metrics by integration type before estimating cost.
• No host-based, no user-based pricing: Monitor as many hosts as you like and add unlimited team members based on your requirements. Both of these make sense for modern architecture and modern engineering teams.

Vendor Lock-in Due to Proprietary Agent

A significant issue with Datadog is vendor lock-in, driven by its proprietary agent. To use Datadog, you must embed their agent throughout your infrastructure. If you ever decide to switch platforms, you face a major migration project: ripping out the Datadog agent everywhere and re-instrumenting your entire application stack for a new tool.

OpenTelemetry is now the default standard for instrumenting cloud-native applications. If you don’t know much about OpenTelemetry, here’s a good read on what is OpenTelemetry and top reasons to use OpenTelemetry.

By using OTel, you instrument your applications with a vendor-neutral standard, not a proprietary tool. This decouples your instrumentation from your observability backend, giving you the freedom to send your data to any OTel-compatible platform, including SigNoz, without being locked in.

SigNoz is OpenTelemetry-native, designed to leverage the full power of OTel data for a unified view of logs, metrics, and traces. We've also recently launched features that double down on our OTel-native approach, including:

• Trace Funnels: Intelligently sample and analyze traces to focus on what's important.
• External API Monitoring: Gain visibility into the performance of third-party APIs your application depends on.
• Out-of-the-box Messaging Queue Monitoring: Effortlessly monitor popular queuing systems.

Why SigNoz is a better open-source Datadog alternative than Grafana

Grafana is the other open-source option many teams consider when moving from Datadog. It started as a data visualization tool, and it remains excellent at that job. If you just want to build dashboards from different data sources, Grafana may be a good fit. But a team replacing Datadog usually needs an opinionated observability product that helps it ingest, explore, correlate, and troubleshoot telemetry without assembling the experience itself. (If you want to explore the wider landscape, see our roundup of the best open-source APM tools.)

Grafana is being marketed as an all-in-one observability tool, but its open-source stack combines separate projects: Prometheus or Mimir for metrics, Loki for logs, Tempo for traces, and Grafana for visualization. Each signal keeps its own storage and query layer.

SigNoz stores logs, metrics, and traces in a single columnar datastore and exposes them through one product.

This matters during an investigation. Engineers can use the same Query Builder experience across signals instead of moving between PromQL for metrics, LogQL for logs, and TraceQL for traces. A shared datastore also reduces the operational overhead of self-hosting multiple backends and makes cross-signal correlation and complex aggregations easier.

SigNoz also exposes OpenTelemetry context inside the product. Engineers can query resource and span attributes, inspect instrumentation scope, span events, span links, and trace identifiers, and use metric metadata without treating OTLP as only an ingestion format. Grafana Cloud accepts OTLP, but stores metrics in Mimir, its Prometheus-compatible database, and maps OTLP metric names and resource attributes to the Prometheus data model. This means teams still work with Prometheus naming and label conventions for those metrics.

SigNoz also provides first-class infrastructure monitoring for Kubernetes and Linux hosts, plus cloud-service monitoring for AWS, Azure, and GCP. Teams can investigate application and infrastructure signals together.

Deployment flexibility as your needs change

Datadog is a closed SaaS product, so the only deployment option is to send data to Datadog Cloud. SigNoz lets you start with open source and move to a managed deployment as your requirements change, without changing observability products. You can choose from five deployment models:

• SigNoz Cloud: A fully managed service for teams that do not want to operate the observability platform.
• Dedicated Enterprise Cloud: A dedicated environment managed by SigNoz for organizations that need stronger isolation and enterprise support.
• Managed BYOC: SigNoz operates the platform in your cloud account, so the data stays in your cloud environment.
• Enterprise Self-Hosted: Your team operates SigNoz in its own infrastructure with enterprise features and support from SigNoz.
• Self-Hosted Community Edition: The open-source, MIT-licensed option for teams that want to operate SigNoz themselves.

If a team later moves from self-hosted to managed observability, SigNoz Cloud keeps the same product experience and uses telemetry-volume pricing without extra per-host, per-user, or custom metric charges. Grafana Cloud has free allowances, but after those allowances, each signal uses a different pricing unit: metrics are billed by active series, while logs and traces are billed by data volume. Some services also add host or user charges. As telemetry grows, teams leaving Datadog for cost reasons can quickly outgrow those free allowances in Grafana Cloud. In those cases, SigNoz Cloud can be easier to forecast and more cost-effective. See our detailed SigNoz, Datadog, New Relic, and Grafana pricing comparison.

An Overview of SigNoz Features

Application metrics

Get out of the box p90, p99 latencies, RPS, Error rates and top endpoints for a service out of the box.

Seamless flow between telemetry signals

Powered by OpenTelemetry's semantic conventions, you can quickly jump between telemetry signals in SigNoz. Found something suspicious in a metric, just click that point in the graph & get details of traces which may be causing the issues. Seamless, Intuitive.

Similarly, we have enabled correlation between other telemetry signals.

APM Metrics to Traces & Logs

Traces to Logs

If you see a API call taking more time than usual, you can go to related logs to investigate further.

Similarly you can click on detailed view of logs and then go to related trace ID to see the flow of user requests.

Logs with Infrastructure metrics

While troubleshooting with logs, you can investigate the related infrastructure metrics to see if issues are happening becuase of that.

Quick filters and an advanced Query Builder for all telemetry signals

SigNoz provides quick filters and a consistent Query Builder experience for logs, metrics, and traces. You can filter by telemetry attributes, build aggregations, and move across signals without learning a separate query language for each backend.

For example, query builder for traces allows you to create queries for finding the p99 latency of services.

Similarly, use quick filters to quickly filter the data that you need.

You can create custom metrics from filtered traces to find metrics of any type of request. Want to find p99 latency of customer_type: premium who are seeing status_code:400. Just set the filters, and you have the graph. Boom!

Flamegraphs & Gantt charts

Detailed flamegraph & Gantt charts to find the exact cause of the issue and which underlying requests are causing the problem. Is it a SQL query gone rogue or a Redis operation is causing an issue? Get more context on your spans with tags and events.

Logs Management

SigNoz provides Logs management with advanced log query builder. You can also monitor your logs in real-time using live tailing. SigNoz uses a columnar database ClickHouse to store logs, which is very efficient at ingesting and storing logs data. Columnar databases like ClickHouse are very effective in storing log data and making it available for analysis.

Metrics & Dashboards

Monitor any metrics important to you. Ingest metrics from your infrastructure or applications and create customized dashboards to monitor them.

Exceptions Monitoring

Monitor exceptions automatically in Python, Java, Ruby, and Javascript. For other languages, just drop in a few lines of code and start monitoring exceptions.

LLM Observability

Building with LLMs? SigNoz provides end-to-end observability for your LLM applications. Track token usage, costs, and latency for providers like OpenAI, Anthropic, and frameworks like LangChain and LlamaIndex.

Agent Native Observability

SigNoz also brings production context into AI-assisted debugging through Agent Native Observability. The SigNoz MCP server lets coding agents such as Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Gemini query traces, logs, metrics, service topology, and deployment history from the development environment. Because the coding agent already has the codebase in context, it can relate production telemetry to the code behind an issue.

Noz is the AI teammate built into SigNoz Cloud. Engineers can ask questions about their telemetry in natural language, let Noz investigate across signals, and use it to create dashboards, alerts, and views inside SigNoz.

Getting started with SigNoz

As discussed earlier, you can choose among five SigNoz deployment models. The fastest way to get started is SigNoz Cloud. You can start with a free trial and test it with your own telemetry.

Organizations that need stronger isolation or data control can choose Dedicated Enterprise Cloud, Managed BYOC, or Enterprise Self-Hosted.

Teams that want to manage an open-source deployment themselves can use our Self-Hosted Community Edition.

If you are migrating from Datadog, our dashboard migration tool translates exported dashboard JSON into SigNoz dashboard definitions. Review imported queries, units, variables, and thresholds, and plan telemetry pipelines, alerts, integrations, permissions, and historical data as separate migration work. If you have more questions, use the SigNoz AI chatbot or join our Slack community.

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