Open-source Observe alternatives

Grafana is a visualization and observability platform that lets you query, chart and alert on data wherever it is stored. It does not hold your data itself; it connects to sources such as Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL and brings their results together in shared dashboards.

Dashboards can be made reusable with template variables that appear as dropdowns, and a single graph may mix queries against different data sources. Explore views support ad-hoc queries, side-by-side comparison of time ranges and a jump from metrics to logs while keeping label filters. Alert rules are defined visually, and notifications go to systems like Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps and OpsGenie. Panel plugins add further visualization types.

Grafana is AGPL-3.0 licensed, written in Go and TypeScript, and can be installed on your own servers; Grafana Labs also runs a hosted offering. It is common in DevOps and SRE teams as the dashboard layer on top of Prometheus-style monitoring, and a public demo site lets you try it first.

SigNoz is an observability platform, open source and built on OpenTelemetry. It aims to replace a fragmented monitoring stack with a single place for logs, metrics, traces, alerts, exceptions and dashboards, and it presents itself as useful for both engineering teams and their AI agents.

The APM view follows how each service performs, covering latency, error rate, throughput, Apdex, the busiest endpoints, and calls to databases and external services. Log management supports ingesting, searching and correlating logs with traces and metrics through a visual query builder. Dashboards can be built with a query builder, PromQL or ClickHouse SQL, infrastructure monitoring covers Kubernetes clusters, pods, nodes and host resources, and LLM and AI observability traces prompts, tool calls, tokens, latency and cost.

You can choose how to run it. SigNoz Cloud is fully managed, with a 30-day free trial and usage-based pricing that starts at $49. Enterprise options cover cloud, bring-your-own-cloud and self-hosted deployments with extra support and controls. The free Community edition runs in your own infrastructure via Docker, Kubernetes or Linux. The repository license is listed as 'Other' on GitHub.

Loki is a log aggregation system from Grafana, described as Prometheus for logs. It is horizontally scalable, highly available and multi-tenant. Instead of indexing the contents of log lines, it indexes a set of labels for each log stream and stores the compressed log text, which the project says makes it simpler to operate and cheaper to run. It is written in Go and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

Because Loki reuses the labels familiar from Prometheus, you can move between metrics and logs using the same label sets, and it has native support in Grafana. It works especially well for Kubernetes pod logs, since metadata such as pod labels is scraped and indexed automatically. A typical stack has three parts: Alloy as the collection agent, Loki for storage and queries, and Grafana for exploration. Alloy replaces Promtail, which is considered feature complete. Unlike Prometheus, Loki receives logs by push.

OpenObserve, often shortened to O2, is open-source observability software spanning logs, metrics, traces and analytics, real user monitoring on web, Android and iOS, session replay, pipelines, SLOs and AI and LLM observability. It is pitched as a lower-cost option next to Datadog, Splunk and Elasticsearch for teams that want complete observability without the complexity or price.

Its architecture uses Parquet columnar storage and an S3-native design, which the project says can cut storage costs by up to 140 times compared with Elasticsearch, with petabyte-scale capacity. Topics reference OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger and Kibana, showing the standards and tools it interoperates with. The README has sections on architecture, comparisons, production readiness, security and compliance, and an enterprise edition.

OpenObserve is AGPL-3.0 licensed, with a hosted cloud option and a self-hosted deployment, and documentation and a Slack community are provided. It suits engineering teams looking to consolidate logging, metrics and tracing in one tool while keeping storage costs under control.

Quickwit is an open-source, cloud-native search engine designed for observability, covering log management and distributed tracing, with metrics support listed on the roadmap. It is written in Rust, builds on the Tantivy search library, and is meant to search large volumes of data kept in cheap object storage.

It provides full-text search and aggregation queries, schemaless or strict-schema indexing, and a RESTful API that is compatible with a large subset of the Elasticsearch and OpenSearch APIs, so existing clients can often be reused. It is native to Jaeger and OpenTelemetry, works as a Grafana data source and can ingest from Kafka, Kinesis and Pulsar. Compute and storage are decoupled, with stateless indexers and searchers, and data can sit on Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage or Google Cloud Storage.

Operational features include multi-tenancy with many indexes, partitioning, retention policies and delete tasks for GDPR use cases, and a Helm chart for Kubernetes. Quickwit is licensed under Apache-2.0 and you run it yourself. It suits teams looking for lower-cost log and trace storage with a familiar search API.

HyperDX is an open-source observability platform for working out why production is broken. It brings logs, metrics, traces, errors and session replays into one place, and works as a search and visualization layer on top of ClickHouse and OpenTelemetry, which the authors compare to Kibana for ClickHouse. It is a core component of ClickStack.

It is schema agnostic and can sit on top of an existing ClickHouse schema. Searching uses full-text and property syntax such as level:err, with SQL as an option, events can be compared with event deltas, high-cardinality events can be charted on dashboards, and alerts can be set up in a few clicks. Live tail shows the newest logs and traces, JSON strings can be queried natively, OpenTelemetry works out of the box, and APM views cover HTTP requests down to database queries.

One deployment option is ClickStack, a bundle of ClickHouse, HyperDX, an OpenTelemetry Collector and MongoDB, and HyperDX can instead be pointed at your own ClickHouse instance. It can also be used with ClickHouse Cloud. The project is MIT licensed and written in TypeScript.

GreptimeDB is an open-source observability database in which metrics, logs and traces share one columnar engine over object storage and one table model of tags, timestamp and fields. When signals share identifiers like service name, host or trace ID, they can be correlated with SQL joins rather than shuttling data between databases.

Ingestion works through OpenTelemetry, Prometheus Remote Write, the Loki push API or Elasticsearch Bulk, and queried with SQL across all signals and PromQL for metrics, so ingestion can migrate one signal at a time without rebuilding collectors. The README lists reasons to use it: replacing a Prometheus plus Loki or Elasticsearch combination with one backend, outgrowing Prometheus on cardinality or retention without the Thanos or Mimir complexity, long retention on object storage, and storing GenAI telemetry next to infrastructure signals.

GreptimeDB is written in Rust, with an Apache-2.0 licensed core, and is run self-hosted on your own infrastructure. Stable, canary and nightly builds are offered. It suits platform and SRE teams wanting a consolidated, cost-conscious observability backend.

Uptrace is an open-source application performance monitoring platform. It collects distributed traces, metrics and logs through OpenTelemetry and presents them in a single interface, so teams can monitor applications and troubleshoot problems without switching between separate tracing, metrics and logging tools.

The interface includes a query builder, a service graph, faceted filters, chart annotations and many prebuilt dashboards that appear automatically as metrics arrive. Alerting rules send notifications through email, Slack, WebHook or AlertManager. Data can be ingested via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Vector, FluentBit and CloudWatch, Grafana can use Uptrace as a Tempo or Prometheus data source, and single sign-on works through OpenID Connect.

Uptrace is written in Go with a Vue front end, stores telemetry in ClickHouse and keeps metadata such as alerts in PostgreSQL. It is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted with Docker, and a cloud demo needs no login. The project says it is meant to cut monitoring costs, which suits engineering teams comparing self-hosted APM options with commercial observability suites.

Traceway is an observability platform built natively on OpenTelemetry. It brings logs, traces, metrics, exception tracking, session replay, AI tracing and on-call paging into one product, and you can start by pointing an OTLP exporter at it without a separate collector or a vendor-specific SDK for each language.

Logs are structured and linked to traces, so you can jump from a log line to its span. Traces show end-to-end waterfalls, endpoint views rank routes by latency percentiles and error rate, and exceptions are grouped into ranked issues with source map support. There is experimental profiling with flame graphs, session replay for web and Flutter apps, and LLM observability covering cost, tokens and latency.

The project is written in Go, licensed under MIT and says that every feature ships in the open-source build with no open-core split. You can self-host it for free, using a setup the README says takes about 90 seconds, or run it on Traceway Cloud if you prefer not to manage infrastructure. It suits engineering teams looking for one tool to find and diagnose production problems.