SigNoz

What SigNoz does

SigNoz puts the three main kinds of telemetry, traces, logs and metrics, in one application with one database. Its APM view shows each service’s latency, error rate, throughput and Apdex score, the slowest endpoints, and the database and external calls behind them. From there you can open individual traces as flame graphs or waterfalls, jump to the logs written during a request, or check the CPU and memory of the Kubernetes pod or host it ran on. Dashboards can be built with a visual query builder, PromQL or ClickHouse SQL, and alerts can be set on any of the signals.

Newer additions include trace funnels, which show where multi-step request flows fail, monitoring of the external APIs your services call (derived from trace data rather than from synthetic probes), an exceptions view, LLM application tracing and an MCP server for coding assistants.

OpenTelemetry and migration

SigNoz is built around OpenTelemetry. Applications are instrumented with the standard OpenTelemetry SDKs and send data over OTLP to the SigNoz collector, which writes it to ClickHouse. Prometheus metrics are accepted too. Because the instrumentation is vendor-neutral, you can later send the same data elsewhere without rewriting code.

That matters most when leaving a commercial platform. SigNoz publishes migration guides for Datadog and New Relic. For Datadog it covers metrics, traces, logs, dashboards and alerts, offers a tool that translates Datadog dashboard JSON, and documents a Datadog receiver in the collector so existing Datadog Agents can keep sending data while you switch services over one at a time.

Self-hosting SigNoz

The free Community Edition runs on Docker Compose, Kubernetes or Linux, and the project now also offers Foundry, a CLI that sets up the whole stack from one declarative file. For Docker, the documentation asks for Linux or macOS, Docker Engine 20.10 or later and at least 4 GB of memory for Docker; on Windows it must run inside WSL 2 with Docker Engine rather than Docker Desktop. The stack consists of the SigNoz server (API, frontend, alert ruler and Alertmanager), the SigNoz OpenTelemetry collector and ClickHouse with ClickHouse Keeper. ClickHouse can be replicated for reliability. You are responsible for storage, scaling, upgrades and backups.

Hosted version and paid editions

SigNoz Cloud is the managed service, with a 30-day free trial, usage-based billing and a choice of hosting region. Enterprise is sold as cloud, bring-your-own-cloud or self-hosted, adding compliance, support, RBAC, ingestion controls and custom retention. The code for these lives in the ee/ and cmd/enterprise/ directories under a proprietary licence; everything else is MIT. SSO and SAML are reserved for paid offers, and the Noz AI assistant is only on SigNoz Cloud.

Limitations

The self-hosted edition lacks SSO, SAML and role-based access, which larger organizations often require. Running ClickHouse well at high volume takes skill. SigNoz does not run synthetic uptime checks from external locations, so pair it with a tool such as Uptime Kuma or Gatus for that. And you get the most out of it only once your services are instrumented with OpenTelemetry.

Who it suits

SigNoz suits engineering teams that want Datadog- or New Relic-style APM, tracing and logs in one place, either on their own infrastructure or as a managed service, and that are ready to adopt OpenTelemetry.