Send Demo App Telemetry to SigNoz Cloud in minutes

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

The OpenTelemetry Demo App is a distributed microservices application with built-in telemetry, making it an ideal environment for exploring 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/SigNoz/opentelemetry-demo-lite.git
cd opentelemetry-demo-lite

Step 2: Start the Demo App

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

OTLP_ENDPOINT=ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443 SIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY=<your-ingestion-key> docker compose up -d

• <your-ingestion-key>: Your SigNoz ingestion key
• <region>: Your SigNoz Cloud region

Alternatively, you can create a .env file in the project root with these values:

OTLP_ENDPOINT=ingest.<region>.signoz.cloud:443
SIGNOZ_INGESTION_KEY=<your-ingestion-key>

Then run:

docker compose up -d

Verify the services are running:

docker compose ps -a

The application is pre-configured to send telemetry data to SigNoz Cloud automatically.

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!

service:
  telemetry:
    logs:
      level: debug

docker compose up -d --build

docker compose logs otel-col

docker compose logs <service-name>

Next Steps

• Set up a Redis dashboard to monitor the database used by the demo app
• Explore Kafka monitoring to observe message queues in the demo app
• Use Infrastructure Monitoring to get a unified view of host and container performance