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Harshal Rembhotkar
Harshal Rembhotkar

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SigNoz case study

#monitoring #devops #opensource #tooling

Hi everyone, welcome back! Today we're talking about SigNoz, it is an open source observability platform that helps developers monitor, visualize and troubleshoot their applications in real-time.

Observability today demands more than just log aggregation. As systems scale horizontally and become distributed, tracking down performance issues across APIs, databases, and services becomes increasingly complex. Traditional monitoring stacks often involve separate tools for metrics, logs, and traces, making correlation time-consuming and unreliable. SigNoz addresses this by offering a unified observability platform built on OpenTelemetry. It brings together distributed tracing, metrics and log analytics in one interface, helping engineering teams understand system behavior across services in real time.

What is SigNoz?

SigNoz is an open-source observability platform that enables developers to monitor and troubleshoot applications using metrics, logs and traces, all in one unified interface. Built natively on top of OpenTelemetry, SigNoz offers a modern alternative to traditional tools like DataDog, New Relic, or Grafana + Prometheus. What makes SigNoz especially appealing is its developer-first design, strong community support, and the fact that it can be fully self-hosted. It gives engineering teams complete control over how they collect, visualize and analyze telemetry data without locking them into expensive vendor ecosystems.

Why Choose SigNoz?

SigNoz offers a unified, open-source observability platform that brings together metrics, traces and logs, all in one place. Built on OpenTelemetry, it’s easy to integrate, fully self-hostable, and cost-effective. With its clean UI, ClickHouse-backed performance, and strong community support, SigNoz is a powerful alternative to traditional tools like Datadog or Grafana without the vendor lock-in.

Key Features of Signoz

Once SigNoz was up and running, we used it for multiple observability needs:

  • Distributed Tracing: Helped trace user requests through services and databases

  • Metrics Dashboard: Monitored RED metrics (Rate, Errors, Duration) for key endpoints

  • Log Integration: Pulled logs using FluentBit and connected them with traces

  • Alerting: Set up alerts to notify us of latency spikes or error surges

  • Dashboards: Created custom views for application health and business KPIs

Security and Compliance

SigNoz provides essential features to secure observability data and meet compliance standards in production environments.

Highlights include:

  • User authentication and role-based access control (RBAC)

  • Single Sign-On (SSO) support via SAML (Okta, Auth0, etc.)

  • Encrypted communication across all components

  • Configurable data retention policies

  • Self-hosting for data sovereignty and privacy

These features help teams control access, manage data responsibly, and align with security best practices and regulations like GDPR or SOC 2 all while maintaining full visibility into system behavior.

Conclusion

SigNoz isn’t just a cheaper alternative to enterprise observability platforms, it’s a thoughtfully designed, community-driven tool built for modern software teams. Its biggest strength lies in giving you deep visibility without vendor lock-in, real-time debugging without complexity and customizable observability without scattered tools.

Whether you’re running your app on Kubernetes, managing a microservices fleet, or just trying to get clarity into your application stack, SigNoz offers a unified way to trace, monitor, and act, all from one place.

References

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