SigNoz is an open-source observability platform designed to consolidate logs, metrics, and distributed traces into a single unified interface. Built on top of OpenTelemetry, it eliminates the complexity of stitching together disparate tools like Prometheus, Jaeger, and Loki. SigNoz is ideal for DevOps teams, SREs, and full-stack developers managing microservices architectures who need deep visibility into application performance without vendor lock-in or high licensing costs. With ClickHouse as its underlying datastore, SigNoz delivers fast querying and low resource overhead while supporting all major programming languages through OpenTelemetry instrumentation.
Unlike traditional monitoring tools that treat logs, metrics, and traces as siloed data sources, SigNoz correlates them natively — enabling users to jump from a high-level metric anomaly directly to the relevant trace and log context. This integrated approach significantly reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR) during outages or performance degradation events. SigNoz offers both a fully managed cloud service and self-hosted deployment options using Docker or Helm, making it accessible for teams of all sizes — from startups to enterprises running complex distributed systems.
What You Get
- Unified Observability - SigNoz combines logs, metrics, and distributed traces in a single interface with native correlation between all three data types, eliminating the need to switch between Prometheus, Jaeger, and ELK stacks.
- OpenTelemetry Native Instrumentation - Supports instrumentation for Java, Python, Node.js, Go, .NET, Ruby, PHP, Elixir, Rust, and Swift via official OpenTelemetry libraries with step-by-step guides for each language.
- ClickHouse-Powered Log Management - Uses ClickHouse (used by Uber and Cloudflare) for high-performance, columnar log storage with fast full-text search, filtering, and aggregation on high-cardinality data.
- Advanced Distributed Tracing - Provides flamegraphs, Gantt charts, and span-level drilldowns with the ability to filter traces by tags (e.g., customer_type=‘premium’) and calculate p99 latency on filtered sets.
- Custom Metrics Dashboards - Build visualizations with pie charts, time-series, bar graphs, and more using a drag-and-drop UI with PromQL and ClickHouse query support for complex aggregations.
- Proactive Alerting - Set alerts on logs, metrics, or traces with threshold-based conditions, anomaly detection, and notification channels (Slack, email, PagerDuty) to catch issues before users are impacted.
- Exception Monitoring - Automatically capture stack traces and custom attributes for exceptions in Python, Java, Ruby, and JavaScript with contextual user identifiers to pinpoint root causes.
- Self-Hosted & Cloud Options - Deploy SigNoz using Docker (
docker-compose up) or Kubernetes via Helm charts, with optional managed cloud service for teams wanting zero maintenance overhead.
Common Use Cases
- Building a multi-tenant SaaS dashboard with real-time analytics - Use SigNoz to correlate user-specific traces, log events, and infrastructure metrics across tenant workloads to identify performance bottlenecks unique to high-value customers.
- Creating a mobile-first e-commerce platform with 10k+ SKUs - Monitor API latency, database queries, and third-party service calls across microservices using SigNoz’s unified tracing to detect slow endpoints impacting checkout conversion.
- Problem → Solution flow: High error rates in payment service → Trace correlation - When metrics show a spike in 5xx errors, jump directly to traces showing which service failed, then view associated logs and exception stack traces — all in one pane.
- DevOps teams managing microservices across multiple cloud providers - Deploy SigNoz self-hosted on AWS, GCP, or Azure using Helm charts to maintain consistent observability standards without vendor-specific tooling.
Under The Hood
SigNoz is a full-stack observability platform designed to unify distributed tracing, logging, and metrics with enterprise-grade capabilities such as role-based access control and anomaly detection. It leverages modern technologies and a modular architecture to support diverse deployment environments.
Architecture
The system adopts a monolithic structure with clear frontend-backend separation, emphasizing modularity and microservice-like organization within the backend. This design enables scalable feature delivery and supports both community and enterprise use cases.
- Modular component structure with well-defined boundaries between layers
- Emphasis on dependency injection and configuration-driven components for flexibility
- Support for role-based access control and enterprise-grade features within a unified platform
Tech Stack
The platform is built using a modern JavaScript/TypeScript frontend and Go backend, integrating deeply with OpenTelemetry for observability. It combines React-based UIs with robust backend services and extensive tooling for development and testing.
- Frontend built with TypeScript, React, and UI libraries like Ant Design and styled-components
- Backend developed in Go with strong OpenTelemetry integration for observability
- Comprehensive tooling including Webpack, ESLint, Prettier, and Husky for development workflows
- Testing ecosystem includes Jest, Playwright, and MSW for unit, end-to-end, and API mocking
Code Quality
The codebase reflects a mixed quality with strong testing practices and consistent error handling in some areas, though technical debt and inconsistencies are present across modules. Type safety is enforced through TypeScript, and linting is configured to maintain code standards.
- Extensive test coverage in frontend frameworks with a focus on unit and end-to-end testing
- Error handling follows common patterns, though consistency varies across modules
- Code linting and formatting tools are in place to enforce style and quality standards
- Multi-language approach introduces some variation in code consistency and maintenance burden
What Makes It Unique
SigNoz distinguishes itself through its unified approach to observability, combining open-source tracing and logging with enterprise-grade features in a single platform. Its modular architecture and OpenTelemetry integration provide flexibility and scalability for diverse deployment scenarios.
- Blends open-source tracing, logging, and metrics with enterprise features like anomaly detection and RBAC
- Deep integration with OpenTelemetry enables seamless deployment across various environments
- Modular architecture supports both community and enterprise use cases with extensible components