SigNoz - Open-source alternative to DataDog
Pranay Prateek
SigNoz TeamMore and more companies are now shifting to a cloud-native & microservices-based architecture. Having an application monitoring tool is critical in this world because you can’t just log into a machine and figure out what’s going wrong.
We have spent years learning about application monitoring & observability. What are the key features an observability tool should have to enable fast resolution of issues.
In our opinion, good observability tools should have
- Out of the box application metrics
- Way to go from metrics to traces to find why some issues are happening
- Seamless flow between metrics, traces & logs — the three pillars of observability
- Filtering of traces based on different tags and filters
- Ability to set dynamic thresholds for alerts
- Transparency in pricing
User experience not great in current open-source tools#
We found that though there are open-source tools like Prometheus & Jaeger, they don’t provide a great user experience as SaaS products do. It takes lots of time and effort to get them working, figuring out the long-term storage, etc. And if you want metrics and traces, it’s not possible as Prometheus metrics & Jaeger traces have different formats.
SaaS tools like DataDog and NewRelic do a much better job at many of these aspects:
- They are easy to setup & get started
- Provide out-of-box application metrics
- Provides correlation between metrics & traces
But it has the following issues:
- Crazy node-based pricing, which doesn’t make sense in today’s micro-services architecture. Any node which is live for more than 8hrs in a month is charged. So, unsuitable for spiky workloads
- Very costly. They charge custom metrics for $5/100 metrics
- It is cloud-only, so not suitable for companies that have concerns with sending data outside their infra
- For any small feature, you are dependent on their roadmap. We think this is an unnecessary restriction for a product which developers use. A product used by developers should be extendible
To fill this gap we built SigNoz, an open-source alternative to DataDog.
Key Features of SigNoz - a DataDog alternative#
Some of our key features which makes SigNoz vastly superior to current open-source products and a great alternative to DataDog are:
- Out of the box application metrics
- Seamless flow between metrics & traces
- Filtering based on tags
- Custom aggregates on filtered traces
- Transparent usage Data
- Detailed Flamegraphs & Gantt charts
Out of the box application metrics#
Get p90, p99 latencies, RPS, Error rates and top endpoints for a service out of the box.
Seamless flow between metrics & traces#
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.
Filtering based on tags#
For example, you can find latency experienced by customers who have customer_type set as premium.
Custom aggregates on filtered traces#
Create custom metrics from filtered traces to find metrics of any type of requests. 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!
Transparent usage Data#
You can drill down details of how many events is each application sending or at what granularity, so that you can adjust your sampling rate as needed and not get a shock at the end of the month ( case with SaaS vendors many a times)
Detailed Flamegraphs & Gantt charts#
Detailed flamegraph & Gantt charts to find exact cause of the issue, and which of the underlying requests is causing the problem. Is it a SQL query gone rogue or a redis operation is causing an issue?
Getting started with SigNoz#
If you have docker installed, getting started with SigNoz just takes three easy steps at the command line:
You can read more about deploying SigNoz from its documentation.
If you liked what you read, then check out our GitHub repo 👇
Our slack community is a great place to get your queries solved instantly and get community support for SigNoz. Link to join 👇
SigNoz slack community