DEV Community

Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

Posted on

OpenObserve Has a Free Log Analytics Platform — 140x Lower Storage Cost Than Elasticsearch

#observability #logging #devops #opensource

OpenObserve (O2) is a cloud-native observability platform for logs, metrics, and traces at petabyte scale.

What You Get for Free

  • Logs — ingest, search, and analyze at scale (200TB+/day in production)
  • Metrics — Prometheus-compatible ingestion and querying
  • Traces — OpenTelemetry-compatible distributed tracing
  • Dashboards — built-in visualization, no Grafana needed
  • Alerts — threshold and anomaly-based alerting
  • SQL queries — familiar SQL for log analysis
  • S3 storage — store logs on S3/MinIO at 140x lower cost
  • Embedded UI — single binary includes the dashboard
  • Cloud free tier — 200GB ingestion/month

Quick Start 

# Single binary — download and run
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openobserve/openobserve/main/download.sh | sh
./openobserve

# Or Docker
docker run -d -p 5080:5080 -e ZO_ROOT_USER_EMAIL=admin@example.com \
  -e ZO_ROOT_USER_PASSWORD=ComplexPass#123 openobserve/openobserve:latest

# Send logs (Elasticsearch-compatible API)
curl -u admin@example.com:ComplexPass#123 \
  -d '[{"level":"info","message":"hello"}]' \
  http://localhost:5080/api/default/logs/_json
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

Why Teams Are Switching from Elasticsearch

Elasticsearch needs massive RAM and expensive SSDs:

  • 140x lower storage — columnar storage + S3 backend
  • Single binary — vs Elasticsearch's Java cluster
  • No JVM tuning — written in Rust, predictable performance
  • Built-in dashboards — no separate Kibana needed

A startup was spending $1,200/mo on Elastic Cloud for 50GB/day of logs. They switched to OpenObserve with S3 storage — same search speed, same dashboards, cost dropped to $45/mo.

Need Custom Data Solutions?

I build production-grade scrapers and data pipelines for startups, agencies, and research teams.

Browse 88+ ready-made scrapers on Apify → — Reddit, HN, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and more.

Custom project? Email me: spinov001@gmail.com — fast turnaround, fair pricing.

Top comments (0)