SkyWalking
APM and monitoring system
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Mar 2026
Apache SkyWalking traces requests end-to-end across your microservices so you can find where things are slow, failing, or misbehaving. It's an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) system that shows you traces, metrics, and logs across your entire architecture.
Apache 2.0, CNCF project. SkyWalking supports auto-instrumentation for Java.NET, Node.js, Python, Go, and more, meaning you often don't need to change your code. Agents attach to your services and report back to the SkyWalking backend.
Fully free. No paid tier, no commercial edition. You self-host everything: the OAP (Observability Analysis Platform) server, the UI, and the storage backend (Elasticsearch, BanyanDB, or PostgreSQL).
The catch: SkyWalking is powerful but operationally heavy. You need the OAP server, a storage backend, and agents on every service. The Java auto-instrumentation is excellent; other languages vary in coverage. The UI is functional but not as polished as Datadog or Grafana. And the documentation assumes familiarity with distributed tracing concepts, not beginner-friendly.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFully open source under Apache 2.0. No paid tier.
Self-hosted costs:
- OAP Server: 2-4 GB RAM minimum, more with scale. ~$20-40/mo on a cloud VM.
- Storage: Elasticsearch cluster ($50-200/mo for a small cluster) or BanyanDB (lighter, newer) or PostgreSQL (cheapest).
- UI: Minimal resources, can share the OAP server.
- Total: $70-240/mo for a small-to-medium deployment.
Comparison to commercial alternatives:
- Datadog APM: $31/host/mo. A 10-service setup = $310/mo minimum, scales fast.
- New Relic: Free up to 100GB/mo, then $0.35/GB.
- SkyWalking: $70-240/mo regardless of how many services you monitor.
SkyWalking wins on cost at scale. You pay for infrastructure, not per-host or per-trace.
Free software. Budget $70-240/mo for infrastructure. Gets cheaper per service than commercial APM as you scale.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- Overkill; use a free tier from New Relic or Grafana Cloud
- Small team
- Consider it once you have five or more microservices and want to avoid commercial APM costs
- Medium team
- Strong choice, because per-host APM pricing from Datadog or New Relic gets expensive here
- Large team
- Excellent value; the flat infrastructure cost beats per-host commercial pricing at scale
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