Open-source Splunk Observability Cloud alternatives

Netdata is a real-time infrastructure monitoring platform. You install an agent on servers, containers or Kubernetes nodes and it starts collecting metrics every second, showing them on dashboards without lengthy setup. Its origin story is a frustration with monitoring tools that offered few metrics at low resolution and cost too much to run.

The project highlights zero-configuration deployment, machine-learning-based anomaly detection and automated analysis, and an efficient agent that uses few resources. Data stays distributed on the monitored machines instead of being shipped to one central store. Integrations cover databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB, plus Docker and Kubernetes, and the topics list mentions export paths to Prometheus, Grafana and InfluxDB. Netdata also advertises AI-assisted troubleshooting and an MCP interface.

The agent is GPL-3.0 licensed and written largely in Go, and Netdata Cloud offers a hosted layer for viewing many nodes together. It suits operations teams and lean engineering groups that want deep visibility quickly rather than building a metrics stack from several separate tools.

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.

Prometheus is a systems and service monitoring tool and time series database, and a project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. It collects metrics from configured targets at set intervals, evaluates rule expressions, shows the results and can fire alerts when conditions are met.

Its data model is multi-dimensional: a time series is identified by a metric name plus key and value labels, and PromQL is the query language built to exploit that structure. Collection uses an HTTP pull model, with a gateway available for pushing metrics from short-lived batch jobs, and targets are found through service discovery or static configuration. Single server nodes are autonomous with no dependence on distributed storage, and hierarchical and horizontal federation is supported.

Prometheus is written in Go under the Apache-2.0 license and ships as precompiled binaries and Docker images on Quay.io and Docker Hub, or can be built from source. It has no hosted service of its own and is typically run next to exporters and a dashboarding tool such as Grafana, which suits cloud-native and Kubernetes environments.

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.

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.

VictoriaMetrics is a monitoring solution and time series database built for performance, cost efficiency and scale. It stores metrics, works with the Prometheus ecosystem and query language, and its topics also list support for InfluxDB, Graphite and OpenTSDB data formats, along with Grafana for dashboards, which makes it a common drop-in backend for existing monitoring setups.

It is offered as a single-node version and a cluster version, both under the Apache License 2.0, with downloadable binaries, container images published to Docker Hub and Quay, and the source code. The project publishes case studies from well-known companies, a quick start and key concepts guide, community channels on Slack, X and YouTube, and a fast-moving changelog. Enterprise support and enterprise releases with long-term support are available, and they can be evaluated with a free trial license. The maintainers also mention security certifications for their development practices.

Written in Go, VictoriaMetrics suits platform and SRE teams that want to store large volumes of metrics efficiently, replacing or extending Prometheus long-term storage. It can be deployed on your own infrastructure, including Kubernetes, and the company offers a managed cloud service as well.

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.

Highlight, at highlight.io, is an open-source monitoring platform for developers. Its aim is to give teams one cohesive tool covering the front end and back end, instead of separate products for errors, logs and user sessions.

The core features are session replay, error monitoring and logging, with tracing and metrics also in scope. Console logs from the front end can be analyzed, and errors are embedded alongside the session in which they happened, so you can see what the user was doing beforehand. Session comments let teams discuss user frustration or bugs, there are integrations with other tools, and client SDKs install with a few lines of code.

You can sign up for the free-to-start hosted version at app.highlight.io, or deploy a hobby instance on Linux with Docker, sized at roughly 8 GB of memory, four CPUs and 64 GB of storage. The code is written in TypeScript and Go, and the repository lists the license as Other, so check the licence file for terms.

Coroot is an open-source observability and application performance monitoring tool. Its pitch is that collecting metrics, logs and traces is not enough on its own, so it turns the data into actionable insights, including AI-powered root cause analysis, predefined inspections and a service map.

It gathers metrics, logs, traces and continuous profiles automatically with eBPF, so legacy and third-party services can be observed without code changes, and it is also vendor-neutral through OpenTelemetry instrumentation. Features include a service map, application health summaries, SLO tracking and alerting, distributed tracing, log pattern clustering with logs-to-traces correlation using ClickHouse, and one-click profiling that drills down to the line of code. Predefined inspections audit each application without configuration.

Coroot is written in Go and licensed under Apache-2.0, with a live demo, documentation and a separate Coroot Enterprise edition. Topics include database monitoring, microservices and Prometheus. It suits SRE and platform teams that want observability for Kubernetes and Linux workloads without manually instrumenting every service.

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.