SigNoz

What is SigNoz?

SigNoz is an open source observability platform that puts traces, metrics, and logs behind a single interface. It’s OpenTelemetry-native — you instrument your apps with the OpenTelemetry standard and send that data to SigNoz — and it stores everything in ClickHouse, a columnar database built for fast queries over large telemetry volumes.

What is SigNoz best for?

Engineering teams that want Datadog-style application monitoring — APM, distributed tracing, logs, and dashboards in one product — without per-host or per-user billing, and who prefer to keep their telemetry data on their own infrastructure. It’s a strong fit for teams already standardizing on OpenTelemetry.

What can SigNoz do?

• Application performance monitoring: P99 latency, error rates, throughput, and Apdex scores per service
• Distributed tracing with flamegraphs and waterfalls to follow requests across services
• Log management with columnar search and built-in trace-to-log correlation
• Metrics and customizable dashboards for services, hosts, Kubernetes, and cloud resources
• Threshold, anomaly, and Apdex-based alerting on any signal
• Infrastructure monitoring for Kubernetes clusters and host-level metrics
• LLM observability for OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, and LiteLLM

Where does SigNoz fall short?

• It runs on ClickHouse, and at scale your team owns ClickHouse operations — a real, specialized database burden that lighter tools don’t impose.
• The free Community edition caps some features: dashboard panels are limited, and enterprise capabilities like SSO live behind the paid tiers.
• It’s a metrics/traces/logs platform, not a full digital-experience suite — real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic checks that Datadog and New Relic bundle aren’t part of the product.

Is SigNoz free?

Yes — the self-hosted Community edition is free and open source under the MIT license, with no limits on data volume or user count; you only pay for the infrastructure it runs on. SigNoz Cloud is the managed, usage-based option (Teams from $49/month, Enterprise from $4,000/month), priced on logs, traces, and metrics volume rather than per host or per seat.

What does SigNoz replace?

SigNoz is a self-hosted alternative to Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace, and the observability side of Splunk. It does the same APM, tracing, and log-analytics job in one product, but you run it yourself and avoid usage-based billing that climbs unpredictably as you scale.

FAQ

Is SigNoz open source? Yes. The core is licensed under MIT, an OSI-approved open source license. Some enterprise features live in a separately-licensed ee/ directory, making it open-core, but the community platform is fully open source and free to self-host.

Can I self-host SigNoz for free? Yes. The Community edition is free with no caps on data volume or users — you deploy it with Docker, Kubernetes, or on Linux and only pay for your own servers. SigNoz Cloud is the paid, managed alternative.

Is SigNoz a good Datadog alternative? For teams that want unified APM, traces, logs, and dashboards with predictable, usage-based pricing, yes. If you rely on Datadog’s bundled real user monitoring or synthetic checks, note those aren’t part of SigNoz.

What do I need to run SigNoz? A host or Kubernetes cluster running SigNoz plus its ClickHouse datastore, and your applications instrumented with OpenTelemetry to send data in. For anything beyond a small deployment, plan for ClickHouse operations.

How is SigNoz different from Grafana? Grafana stitches observability together from separate components (Loki, Tempo, Mimir, Prometheus), while SigNoz serves logs, metrics, and traces from a single ClickHouse-backed application — fewer moving parts to operate.