The Open Source Alternative to DataDog & New Relic

🩺 Vitals

📦 Version: v0.110.0 (Released 2026-01-28)
🚀 Velocity: Active (Last commit 2026-01-30)
🌟 Community: 25.5k Stars · 1.9k Forks
🐞 Backlog: 1553 Open Issues

🏗️ Profile

Official: signoz.io
Source: github.com/SigNoz/signoz
License: MIT
Deployment: Docker / Kubernetes
Data Model: ClickHouse (Columnar OLAP)
Jurisdiction: USA 🇺🇸
Compliance: SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA
Complexity: Medium (3/5) - ClickHouse-based Architecture
Maintenance: Medium (3/5) - High performance storage tuning
Enterprise Ready: High (5/5) - Full OTel native & RBAC

1. The Executive Summary

What is it? SigNoz is a full-stack open-source observability platform that serves as a direct alternative to DataDog, New Relic, and Prometheus/Grafana stacks. It unifies APM (Application Performance Monitoring), Logs, and Distributed Tracing into a single, cohesive user interface. Built natively on OpenTelemetry and powered by ClickHouse (a high-performance analytical database), SigNoz is engineered to handle massive volumes of telemetry data with significantly lower query latency and storage costs than traditional solutions.

The Strategic Verdict:

🔴 For Simple Static Sites: Overkill. If you just need "is it up?", a simple uptime monitor is better.
🟢 For High-Scale SaaS & Microservices: Strong Buy. The cost savings of ClickHouse storage vs. DataDog's indexing fees can be massive (often 10x cheaper). The unified UI simplifies debugging for engineering teams.

2. The "Hidden" Costs (TCO Analysis)

Cost Component	Proprietary (DataDog / New Relic)	SigNoz (Open Source)
Ingestion Fees	Extremely High ($0.10-$0.30/GB). Charges for custom metrics, indexing, and retention.	Free (Self-Hosted). You only pay for raw storage/compute.
User/Seat Costs	Often charged per seat for advanced features.	Unlimited Users.
Data Retention	Expensive to retain logs > 30 days.	Cheap. ClickHouse compression allows affordable long-term retention on S3/Disk.

3. The "Day 2" Reality Check

🚀 Deployment & Operations

Installation: SigNoz is typically deployed via Helm charts on Kubernetes orDocker Compose. It spins up the Query Service, OTel Collector, and ClickHouse database.
Scalability: ClickHouse is the secret sauce here. It allows SigNoz to ingest millions of events per second on relatively modest hardware compared to ElasticSearch-based stacks.

🛡️ Security & Governance

Access Control: The Open Source version includes basic authentication. Granular RBAC and SSO (SAML/OIDC) are typically part of the paid Enterprise edition.
Data Privacy: Full control over data sanitization (scrubbing PII from logs/traces) before it hits the database, which is critical for GDPR compliance.

SigNoz