Technical Architecture

Overview

SigNoz leverages the power of OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse to deliver a comprehensive observability platform. Our architecture is designed for scalability, performance, and ease of use. Telemetry data from various sources flows into the SigNoz OpenTelemetry collector, which efficiently processes and routes this data to ClickHouse — a high-performance analytics database. The SigNoz backend extracts insights from this data through optimized queries and transforms it into actionable information. As a unified component, SigNoz serves both the API backend and the intuitive ReactJS frontend, providing users with a seamless experience to visualize and analyze their application performance in real-time.

Components

ClickHouse

At the core of SigNoz's data storage is ClickHouse—a lightning-fast, column-oriented database engineered specifically for analytical workloads. ClickHouse excels at:

• Processing petabytes of telemetry data with minimal latency
• Executing complex analytical queries in milliseconds
• Delivering exceptional compression ratios to optimize storage costs
• Scaling horizontally to accommodate growing observability needs

SigNoz offers flexible deployment options, supporting both replicated and non-replicated ClickHouse configurations to match your reliability and performance requirements.

SigNoz OTel Collector

The SigNoz OpenTelemetry Collector accepts telemetry data from diverse sources and writes it to ClickHouse. It is built on the OpenTelemetry Collector and is expertly configured to:

• Ingest telemetry data from diverse sources including Jaeger, Kafka, OpenCensus, OTLP, and Zipkin
• Provide protocol translation for seamless integration with existing monitoring tools
• Process and enrich data with metadata for more meaningful analysis

This versatile collector accepts data directly from instrumented applications or via intermediate OTel collectors, offering flexible deployment options for any infrastructure.

SigNoz Binary

SigNoz binary is like the central nervous system of our observability platform. It is a bundled service that includes:

• Frontend: A statically built ReactJS application that provides intuitive visualization of telemetry data
• Apiserver: Serves the frontend, exposes APIs to query observability data and manage metadata such as organizations, users etc
• OpAMP: Runs an OpAMP server which dynamically configures log pipelines in the SigNoz OTelcollector
• Ruler: Evaluates alert rules and sends alerts to the alertmanager
• Alertmanager: Handles alert deduplication, grouping, and notification delivery

This bundled component architecture simplifies deployment while providing a complete observability solution that enables teams to monitor system performance, identify issues quickly, and optimize their applications with confidence.