SigNoz

What it does

SigNoz is an observability platform that takes OpenTelemetry data directly and stores it in ClickHouse. Logs, metrics and traces live in one place, so a slow endpoint can be traced to a span and then to the log lines that span produced without exporting data between tools.

The OpenTelemetry choice matters more than it sounds. Most observability vendors ship a proprietary agent, and instrumenting for one means re-instrumenting to leave. SigNoz reads the OTel wire format, so the instrumentation in your code is the same instrumentation any other OTel backend would accept.

Querying

Two query languages are available. PromQL covers metrics for anyone arriving from Prometheus, and ClickHouse SQL is there for questions the dashboard builder cannot express. The SQL escape hatch is useful on high-cardinality data where aggregations need to be written out explicitly.

Alerting routes to the usual channels, and the ClickHouse backend handles the retention windows most teams want without aggressive downsampling.

What it costs

The Community Edition is open source and free, and you run it. SigNoz Cloud starts at $49/month with $49 of usage included, which is roughly 163 GB of logs or traces. Past that, logs and traces bill at $0.30/GB and metrics at $0.10 per million samples. Cloud retention is 15 days for logs and traces, one month for metrics. Users and hosts are unlimited on every paid tier, so the bill tracks data volume rather than team size.

Enterprise starts around $4,000/month and adds volume discounts, BYOC or self-hosted deployment with support, and an SLA. Startups under three years old with fewer than 30 employees and under $6M raised pay $19/month for the first year.

Worth knowing before you commit

Self-hosting SigNoz means running ClickHouse, and at volume that is a database to operate rather than a container to start. Teams who pick the free tier to avoid Datadog bills sometimes find they have traded a cost problem for a staffing one.

The product also does not cover real user monitoring or synthetic checks. If browser-side performance and uptime probes are part of what you need, SigNoz handles the backend half and something else handles the rest.