Send Demo App Telemetry to SigNoz Cloud in minutes

Want to explore SigNoz without setting up your own app? This quickstart guide walks you on how to spin up the OpenTelemetry Demo Application and start sending logs, metrics, and traces to SigNoz Cloud in minutes.

The OpenTelemetry Demo App is a distributed application with built-in telemetry and simulated failure scenarios. This makes it an ideal environment for testing observability workflows with SigNoz.

Prerequisites

• A SigNoz Cloud account
• Docker and Docker Compose installed

Setup

Step 1: Clone the OpenTelemetry Demo App

git clone https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-demo.git
cd opentelemetry-demo

Step 2: Configure the Collector to Send Data to SigNoz

Edit the file src/otel-collector/otelcol-config-extras.yml and add the following exporter configuration:

exporters:
  otlp:
    endpoint: "https://ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443"
    tls:
      insecure: false
    headers:
      signoz-ingestion-key: <your-ingestion-key>
  debug:
    verbosity: detailed

service:
  pipelines:
    metrics:
      exporters: [otlp]
    traces:
      exporters: [spanmetrics, otlp]
    logs: 
      exporters: [otlp]

• Replace <your-ingestion-key> with your SigNoz ingestion key
• Set the <region> to match your SigNoz Cloud region

Step 3: Start the Demo App

From the root of the opentelemetry-demo directory, run:

docker compose up -d

Verify the services are running:

docker compose ps -a

If you're running the app in your local machine, visit http://localhost:8080 to interact with the application.

Step 4: Verify Telemetry in SigNoz Cloud

1. Navigate to the Services tab — you should see a list of services from the demo app
2. Use the Service Map to visualize the architecture and request flows
3. Check the Traces, Logs, and Metrics tabs to explore telemetry data

You are now successfully sending data to SigNoz Cloud!

Next Steps

To simulate real-world debugging scenarios and test observability features:

• Visit http://localhost:8080/feature
• Enable flags to simulate failures (e.g., KafkaQueueProblems, cartFailure, productCatalogFailure)
• Import our custom dashboards:
  • Kafka Metrics Dashboard JSON
  • Span Metrics Dashboard JSON

For more real-world scenarios simulated by the OpenTelemetry Demo and solved using SigNoz, check out this blog.