SigNoz

What hackers pick instead

• GrafanaFree, open-source dashboard and monitoring tool that people use to visualize metrics, logs and alerts; the main caveat is complexity grows quickly as the stack and data volume scale.71recommend
• PrometheusFree open-source monitoring system people use with Grafana to collect and alert on metrics, valued for simplicity. Caveat: a single node doesn't scale well and needs Mimir or Thanos.48recommend
• DatadogRecommended for fast debugging, log search, dashboards and AI-assisted investigation across infrastructure and services. Most common caveat: costs grow quickly with data volume and host count.40recommend
• SentryError monitoring service that alerts on new issues with commit context; people like it for the self-hosted option and integrations. Self-hosting is hard to install and maintain.31recommend
• SuperlogRecommended as an observability tool that installs with one prompt, adds logs and proposes bug fixes. Common caveat: it may not be mature enough for production systems.15recommend

Every quote

The 22 most detailed of 26 comments. Each links to the original.

1. we're opentelemetry-native and apart from many out of box charts for APM, infra monitoring, and logs

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”

2. It costs me $30/month and I can throw large quantities of data at it and it doesn’t break a sweat.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “I built Vector. Now I'm answering the question your observability vendor won't”

3. SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn’t great.

   Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?”

4. I was paying a fortune for a cloud observability platform that cost more and more every month

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”

5. Mostly slick, under active development, communicative team, open source

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”

6. Works nicely with my existing Signoz, costs nothing extra

   Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)”

7. seem easy to self-host and decent enough

   Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “Logging sucks”

8. make SigNoz deployment actually painless

   Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Foundry:Deploy and manage full observability stack on Linux with a single binary”

9. Signoz is good, and active development

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”

10. open source and opentelemetry-native

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”

11. Its the closest I have tried, but I still wouldn't put it quite at the same level of usability

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “OpenTelemetry: Escape Hatch from the Observability Cartel”

12. it's not a 100% match, but you can do Prometheus metrics, logs analysis, dashboards

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “I can't recommend Grafana anymore”

13. It exposes a programmatic trace API, which makes building custom views possible

    Recommends · Dec 2025 · in “We built OTEL observability directly into our AI agent framework”

14. I believe both are very good products that focus on slightly different things.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s”

15. I prefer to have my sensitive system logs and traces in house.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Datadog, Thank You for Blocking Us”

16. custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls

    Recommends · Aug 2026 · in “Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?”

17. You don't need to sift through 26 log files.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “What Even Are Microservices?”

18. works well enough for the main APM use-case

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Ask HN: Cheaper Datadog Anyone?”

19. I've heard good things about SigNoz as well

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Show HN: Spikelog – A simple metrics service for scripts, cron jobs, and MVPs”

20. it too relies on a mix of query languages

    Mixed · Aug 2026 · in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”

21. feel painful to setup and manage as coolify projects

    Criticizes · Feb 2026 · in “Ask HN: I've started using Coolify, any recommendations?”

22. neither seems particularly pleasant

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It)”