I am a 3rd year Computer Engineering student and till now, I have never touched an observability tool in my life. I found the hackathon "Agents of SigNoz" and decided to go all-in and self-host SigNoz from scratch, with literally no clue what "observability" even meant.
Setting It Up Wasn't As Simple As I Expected.
I began by installing Docker Desktop, which I followed a YouTube tutorial for as I had never used it before. About halfway through it asked me to install something called WSL2 (Windows Subsystem for Linux) – I didn’t know what that was, but I just followed the prompts and let it install. Docker hung for a few minutes on "Engine starting…" after a restart and I actually thought I did something wrong, but it turns out that's normal the first time.
Next, I tried to clone the SigNoz GitHub repo but realized I didn't even have Git installed on my laptop so that was another quick install before I could continue.
Then comes the confusing part, the official guide told me to run docker compose, but that way has been deprecated. Now SigNoz uses a new tool named Foundry to install all of it instead. I had to download Foundry separately, write a small config file called casting.yaml and run a single command to deploy it.
After all that back and forth, it was honestly a pretty satisfying moment when the terminal finally showed all containers started successfully.
Exploring the Dashboard.
Once I had everything up and running, I opened localhost:8080 and was asked to create an admin account (just an email and password to get into my own local workspace). Considering I am self-hosting this on my own laptop I was surprised at how clean and professional the interface looked. I poked around the sidebar to see what each section looked like: Dashboards, Alerts, Traces and a Meter page that tracks usage. I had not yet hooked up any real data, so most sections were empty states, but it even gave me a sense of what SigNoz is built to do.
Why Alerts Caught My Attention
Alerts was the only thing I tried that really resonated with me. Instead of manually monitoring dashboards 24/7, SigNoz allows you to set rules so it can notify you automatically, say if memory usage spikes or an API starts failing. Having come from projects like INTERNSHIELD where we had no real monitoring and just hoped things worked, this felt like exactly the kind of tool that could have saved us some late night debugging.
What I'd Explore Next.
The most confusing part was that the installation procedure has changed recently: most tutorials on the web still describe docker-compose setup, which is no longer supported. Now that I have SigNoz installed, I want to try and connect one of my own small projects to it and set up an alert to get notified so that I can actually see how the whole process works.
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