SigNoz
Open-source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and observability platform built on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse. SigNoz provides distributed tracing, metrics monitoring, and log management in a single UI — comparable to Jaeger + Prometheus + Grafana in one tool. Designed as a developer-friendly, self-hosted alternative to Datadog with native OpenTelemetry support.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
Open source for auditability. SOC2 for Cloud. Self-hosted keeps trace and log data in your infrastructure. RBAC available in Enterprise. TLS management is deployer's responsibility for self-hosted.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You want a self-hosted Datadog alternative with native OpenTelemetry support, a unified logs+traces+metrics UI, and no per-host or per-metric pricing.
Avoid When
You need enterprise managed support, broad proprietary integration coverage, or your team doesn't want to manage observability infrastructure.
Use Cases
- • Trace agent service-to-service calls with end-to-end distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry instrumentation
- • Monitor agent application metrics (latency, error rate, request volume) with pre-built dashboards and custom queries
- • Correlate logs and traces for agent error debugging — jump from a log line directly to the associated trace
- • Set up latency and error rate alerts for agent services with threshold-based alerting and notification routing
- • Profile agent service performance and identify bottlenecks with flame graphs and span-level timing breakdowns
Not For
- • Teams without Kubernetes or Docker infrastructure for self-hosting — SigNoz requires container orchestration for production deployment
- • Organizations needing extensive SaaS integrations without setup — Datadog has more out-of-the-box integrations
- • Non-OpenTelemetry instrumented applications — SigNoz is OTel-native; legacy proprietary agent instrumentation not supported
Interface
Authentication
JWT-based authentication with user accounts. API token for programmatic access. Self-hosted auth configured via SigNoz admin panel. Enterprise supports SSO/SAML.
Pricing
MIT-licensed open source core is free. SigNoz Cloud is a managed hosted version. Self-hosting requires ClickHouse for data storage — non-trivial infrastructure but documented setup.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ Requires OpenTelemetry instrumentation in agent code — proprietary Datadog/Jaeger agents don't work without migration
- ⚠ ClickHouse deployment is required for self-hosted — adds significant infrastructure complexity compared to simpler time-series DBs
- ⚠ UI is the primary workflow; API for programmatic alert or dashboard management is less comprehensive than Datadog's API
- ⚠ Sampling configuration must be tuned for high-volume agent services — 100% trace sampling creates storage issues at scale
- ⚠ ClickHouse performance tuning is required for large trace volumes — out-of-the-box configuration may need adjustment for production scale
Alternatives
Full Evaluation Report
Detailed scoring breakdown, competitive positioning, security analysis, and improvement recommendations for SigNoz.
Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-06.