Introduction

Create a SigNoz Cloud Account

Don’t have an account? Create a SigNoz Cloud account and add your team members.

What is SigNoz?

SigNoz is an open-source observability tool powered by OpenTelemetry. You can use SigNoz to monitor your applications and infrastructure and get insights about it. It supports a wide variety of telemetry signals like logs, metrics, traces, and exceptions, so you can use SigNoz as a one-stop observability tool to monitor your applications.

You can set alerts and get notified in your preferred channel about any issue or some critical metric crossing a threshold. You can then use SigNoz as an analytics tool to debug the issue using its different features.

SigNoz is built on top of OpenTelemetry, which gives you the advantage of keeping your code vendor-free.

What is OpenTelemetry?

If you have never heard about OpenTelemetry, you can think of it as the agent that vendors provide to collect data from your applications and infrastructure. The difference is that vendors provide a proprietary agent that you integrate with your application, leading to lock-in with that vendor, while OpenTelemetry is an open-source standard which you can use to collect telemetry data and send it to any vendor that supports OpenTelemetry data.

You can learn more about OpenTelemetry from its official website.

Although a lot of vendors support OpenTelemetry, SigNoz has been built on OpenTelemetry since day 1. Our docs are OpenTelemetry-first, and we utilize OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions to provide richer context while debugging applications.

Features of SigNoz

Application Performance Monitoring

Use SigNoz APM to monitor your applications and services. It comes with out-of-box charts for key application metrics like p99 latency, error rate, Apdex and operations per second. You can also monitor the database and external calls made from your application.

You can instrument your application with OpenTelemetry to get started.

Log Management

SigNoz can be used as a centralized log management solution. We use ClickHouse (used by likes of Uber & Cloudflare) as a datastore, ⎯ an extremely fast and highly optimized storage for logs data. Instantly search through all your logs using quick filters and a powerful query builder.

You can also create charts on your logs and monitor them with customized dashboards.

Distributed Tracing

Distributed Tracing is essential to troubleshoot issues in microservices applications. Powered by OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing in SigNoz can help you track user requests across services to help you identify performance bottlenecks.

See user requests in a detailed breakdown with the help of Flamegraphs and Gantt Charts. Click on any span to see the entire trace represented beautifully, which will help you make sense of where issues actually occurred in the flow of requests.

Alerts

Use alerts in SigNoz to get notified when anything unusual happens in your application. You can set alerts on any type of telemetry signal (logs, metrics, traces), create thresholds and set up a notification channel to get notified. Advanced features like alert history and anomaly detection can help you create smarter alerts.

Alerts in SigNoz help you identify issues proactively so that you can address them before they reach your customers.

Metrics & Dashboards

Ingest metrics from your infrastructure or applications and create customized dashboards to monitor them. Create visualization that suits your needs with a variety of panel types like pie chart, time-series, bar chart, etc.

Create queries on your metrics data quickly with an easy-to-use metrics query builder. Add multiple queries and combine those queries with formulae to create really complex queries quickly.

Exceptions

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

See the detailed stack trace for all exceptions caught in your application. You can also log in custom attributes to add more context to your exceptions. For example, you can add attributes to identify users for which exceptions occurred.

Start Sending Data

Once you have signed up for a cloud account, you can use the onboarding module inside the product to get started or use any of the following docs as per your use case.

Application Performance Monitoring

Send Logs

Send Metrics

Create Dashboards

Exceptions Monitoring

Create Alerts