The Lens

SigNoz gives you performance traces, error rates, and system metrics in one dashboard. It's built on OpenTelemetry (the open standard for collecting observability data), which means you're not locked into a proprietary SDK. Your instrumentation works with any compatible backend.

The self-hosted version is free with all features. The managed cloud starts at $199/mo for the Teams plan. Both use the same codebase, nothing is held back from self-hosters. Self-hosting runs on Docker or Kubernetes with ClickHouse as the storage backend. This is the main ops consideration. ClickHouse is powerful but needs resources. Plan for a VM with 8GB+ RAM minimum and growing storage. Setup takes 2-4 hours.

Solo developers: the cloud free tier or a small self-hosted instance works. Small teams: self-host if you have ops capacity, otherwise cloud Teams at $199/mo replaces Datadog bills 10x higher. Growing teams: this is SigNoz's pitch: Datadog-level visibility at a fraction of the cost.

The catch: SigNoz is younger than Grafana/Prometheus and the plugin ecosystem is smaller. If you need 200 pre-built integrations and dashboards, Grafana's ecosystem is unmatched. If you want a unified logs-traces-metrics platform without stitching three tools together, SigNoz is cleaner.