SigNoz

SigNoz puts traces, metrics, and logs in one dashboard, the three pillars of observability you'd otherwise stitch together from separate tools. It's built on OpenTelemetry, the open standard for collecting this data, so your instrumentation isn't locked to a proprietary SDK and works with any compatible backend. The self-hosted version is free and holds nothing back: same codebase as the cloud, every feature included.

Running it yourself means running ClickHouse, which is the real ops consideration. ClickHouse is fast but hungry, so plan for a VM with 8GB+ of RAM and storage that grows with your data. Docker or Kubernetes, a couple of hours to stand up. If you have the ops capacity, this is where the savings live.

Solo developers: the cloud free tier or a small self-hosted box is plenty. Small teams with ops capacity: self-host. Everyone else: SigNoz Cloud starts at $49/mo for the Teams plan plus usage ($0.30/GB for logs and traces, $0.10 per million metric samples), and it still undercuts a Datadog bill many times over. That's the whole pitch, Datadog-level visibility without the Datadog invoice.

The catch is maturity. SigNoz is younger than the Grafana and Prometheus stack, and its plugin and integration ecosystem is smaller. If you need hundreds of prebuilt dashboards and integrations, Grafana still wins. If you want one clean unified platform instead of three tools duct-taped together, SigNoz is the better shape.