{"slug": "signoz", "name": "SigNoz", "category": "observability", "category_name": "Monitoring and analytics", "description": "Open-source observability platform for traces, metrics, and logs built on OpenTelemetry.", "recommenders": 5, "commenters": 6, "warners": 0, "score": 4.726, "rising": 1.02, "first": "2025-12-15", "latest": "2026-09-14", "why": "HN commenters like SigNoz as an OpenTelemetry-native backend with good dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, plus an API they can script or query programmatically.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 5, "neutral": 0, "compare": 1, "warn": 0}, "spark": [0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["OpenTelemetry native", "Programmatic API"], "caveat": "Weak alerting", "short_quote": "SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great.", "icon": true, "domain": null, "github_repo": "github.com/signoz/signoz", "official_url": "https://signoz.io", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["SigNoz", "Signoz"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters like SigNoz as an OpenTelemetry-native backend", "cites": [{"id": 757949217, "item_id": 47371826, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371826", "by": "wise0wl", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Signoz is newer to the game.  I'm glad there are more competitors and vendors using OpenTelemetry natively.", "excerpt": "The OpenTelemetry spec is absolutely what folks have been waiting for for as long as I've been in computing (~20 years). A single standard that is implemented in nearly every popular language with very close feature parity. It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks. I took it upon myself to write a library for my current employer (4yrs ago now?) that abstracted and standardiz", "context": "", "use_case": "observability backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry for Rust Developers"}, {"id": 740483136, "item_id": 46280196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280196", "by": "gaurav12342345", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We ended up using SigNoz largely because: - It exposes a programmatic trace API", "excerpt": "A single agent request can fan out across sub-agents, tools, model calls, retries, and external APIs. When something goes wrong, logs aren\u2019t enough and raw traces aren\u2019t very helpful unless you can actually understand them. The hard part isn\u2019t emitting OpenTelemetry spans. That\u2019s easy. The hard part is turning high-cardinality agent traces into something a human can reason about. In our agent framework at Inkeep, we ", "context": "works at Inkeep on an AI agent framework", "use_case": "OTEL backend for agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "We built OTEL observability directly into our AI agent framework"}, {"id": 761350882, "item_id": 47584430, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584430", "by": "kisamoto", "date": "2026-03-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz", "excerpt": "Claude Code supports using OpenTelemetry to gather some metrics including token usage, cost, user prompts and tool calls (unfortunately no system prompts). This is possible without custom certificates, MITM or proxies. However you do need something to collect, store and visualise the OTEL data. I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this but you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz. Lea", "context": "", "use_case": "OTEL data visualisation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana"}]}, {"text": " with good dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring", "cites": [{"id": 784669840, "item_id": 49041865, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041865", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great.", "excerpt": "I\u2019d recommend self-hosting because most SaaS providers charge or limit by usage and it can add up fast. I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry. Why both? SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great. Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice. They just added metrics monitoring which I ", "context": "", "use_case": "traces and metrics dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?"}]}, {"text": ", plus an API they can script or query programmatically.", "cites": [{"id": 740483136, "item_id": 46280196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280196", "by": "gaurav12342345", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We ended up using SigNoz largely because: - It exposes a programmatic trace API", "excerpt": "A single agent request can fan out across sub-agents, tools, model calls, retries, and external APIs. When something goes wrong, logs aren\u2019t enough and raw traces aren\u2019t very helpful unless you can actually understand them. The hard part isn\u2019t emitting OpenTelemetry spans. That\u2019s easy. The hard part is turning high-cardinality agent traces into something a human can reason about. In our agent framework at Inkeep, we ", "context": "works at Inkeep on an AI agent framework", "use_case": "OTEL backend for agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "We built OTEL observability directly into our AI agent framework"}, {"id": 791820786, "item_id": 49488799, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488799", "by": "vpk11", "date": "2026-08-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well", "excerpt": "I use CLI tools for Git, Atlassian (ACLI), and Metabase, plus custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well at the moment for me.", "context": "", "use_case": "observability API calls", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?"}]}, {"text": " The main caveat is weak alerting, which one user covers by also running Sentry.", "cites": [{"id": 784669840, "item_id": 49041865, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041865", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great.", "excerpt": "I\u2019d recommend self-hosting because most SaaS providers charge or limit by usage and it can add up fast. I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry. Why both? SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great. Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice. They just added metrics monitoring which I ", "context": "", "use_case": "traces and metrics dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "OpenTelemetry native", "summary": "Commenters use it as an OTel backend and welcome vendors that support OpenTelemetry natively.", "quotes": [{"id": 757949217, "item_id": 47371826, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371826", "by": "wise0wl", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Signoz is newer to the game.  I'm glad there are more competitors and vendors using OpenTelemetry natively.", "excerpt": "The OpenTelemetry spec is absolutely what folks have been waiting for for as long as I've been in computing (~20 years). A single standard that is implemented in nearly every popular language with very close feature parity. It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks. I took it upon myself to write a library for my current employer (4yrs ago now?) that abstracted and standardiz", "context": "", "use_case": "observability backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry for Rust Developers"}, {"id": 740483136, "item_id": 46280196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280196", "by": "gaurav12342345", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We ended up using SigNoz largely because: - It exposes a programmatic trace API", "excerpt": "A single agent request can fan out across sub-agents, tools, model calls, retries, and external APIs. When something goes wrong, logs aren\u2019t enough and raw traces aren\u2019t very helpful unless you can actually understand them. The hard part isn\u2019t emitting OpenTelemetry spans. That\u2019s easy. The hard part is turning high-cardinality agent traces into something a human can reason about. In our agent framework at Inkeep, we ", "context": "works at Inkeep on an AI agent framework", "use_case": "OTEL backend for agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "We built OTEL observability directly into our AI agent framework"}, {"id": 761350882, "item_id": 47584430, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584430", "by": "kisamoto", "date": "2026-03-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz", "excerpt": "Claude Code supports using OpenTelemetry to gather some metrics including token usage, cost, user prompts and tool calls (unfortunately no system prompts). This is possible without custom certificates, MITM or proxies. However you do need something to collect, store and visualise the OTEL data. I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this but you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz. Lea", "context": "", "use_case": "OTEL data visualisation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana"}]}, {"label": "Programmatic API", "summary": "Its trace API can be driven from code or shell scripts.", "quotes": [{"id": 740483136, "item_id": 46280196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280196", "by": "gaurav12342345", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We ended up using SigNoz largely because: - It exposes a programmatic trace API", "excerpt": "A single agent request can fan out across sub-agents, tools, model calls, retries, and external APIs. When something goes wrong, logs aren\u2019t enough and raw traces aren\u2019t very helpful unless you can actually understand them. The hard part isn\u2019t emitting OpenTelemetry spans. That\u2019s easy. The hard part is turning high-cardinality agent traces into something a human can reason about. In our agent framework at Inkeep, we ", "context": "works at Inkeep on an AI agent framework", "use_case": "OTEL backend for agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "We built OTEL observability directly into our AI agent framework"}, {"id": 791820786, "item_id": 49488799, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488799", "by": "vpk11", "date": "2026-08-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well", "excerpt": "I use CLI tools for Git, Atlassian (ACLI), and Metabase, plus custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well at the moment for me.", "context": "", "use_case": "observability API calls", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?"}]}, {"label": "Dashboards and traces", "summary": "Praised for its dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring.", "quotes": [{"id": 784669840, "item_id": 49041865, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041865", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great.", "excerpt": "I\u2019d recommend self-hosting because most SaaS providers charge or limit by usage and it can add up fast. I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry. Why both? SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great. Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice. They just added metrics monitoring which I ", "context": "", "use_case": "traces and metrics dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?"}]}, {"label": "Easy integration", "summary": "A custom OTel agent worked nicely with an existing SigNoz setup.", "quotes": [{"id": 795242466, "item_id": 49702654, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49702654", "by": "ElFitz", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Works nicely with my existing Signoz", "excerpt": "https://github.com/lightless-labs/pessimal: I got bitten a few times too many by my headless VM running out of disk space, so I had Claude build a minimal OTel agent sending metrics to an OTel collector (Signoz for now), and an iOS / macOS app to query it at regular intervals. Works nicely with my existing Signoz, costs nothing extra, but I\u2019ve yet to test it against Honeycomb and Clickstack. Apps are in private TestF", "context": "", "use_case": "OTel metrics collection", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Weak alerting", "summary": "One user says its alerting system isn't great and pairs it with Sentry.", "quotes": [{"id": 784669840, "item_id": 49041865, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041865", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great.", "excerpt": "I\u2019d recommend self-hosting because most SaaS providers charge or limit by usage and it can add up fast. I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry. Why both? SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great. Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice. They just added metrics monitoring which I ", "context": "", "use_case": "traces and metrics dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?"}]}, {"label": "Newer entrant", "summary": "One commenter notes it is newer to the observability market.", "quotes": [{"id": 757949217, "item_id": 47371826, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371826", "by": "wise0wl", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Signoz is newer to the game.  I'm glad there are more competitors and vendors using OpenTelemetry natively.", "excerpt": "The OpenTelemetry spec is absolutely what folks have been waiting for for as long as I've been in computing (~20 years). A single standard that is implemented in nearly every popular language with very close feature parity. It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks. I took it upon myself to write a library for my current employer (4yrs ago now?) that abstracted and standardiz", "context": "", "use_case": "observability backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry for Rust Developers"}]}], "who": [{"by": "gaurav12342345", "context": "works at Inkeep on an AI agent framework", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280196", "date": "2025-12-15"}], "tags": ["for OpenTelemetry users", "for AI agent tracing", "self-hostable"], "use_cases": ["otel metrics collection", "observability api calls", "traces and metrics dashboards", "otel data visualisation", "observability backend", "otel backend for agent traces"], "compared": [{"slug": "opentelemetry", "name": "OpenTelemetry", "co": 3, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "grafana", "name": "Grafana", "co": 2, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [{"id": 734998992, "item_id": 45937437, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937437", "by": "ankit01-oss", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "we're opentelemetry-native and apart from many out of box charts for APM, infra monitoring, and logs", "excerpt": "You can check out: https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz we're opentelemetry-native and apart from many out of box charts for APM, infra monitoring, and logs, you can also build customized dashboards with lots of visualization option. p.s - i am one of the maintainers", "context": "SigNoz maintainer", "use_case": "observability dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}, {"id": 734998672, "item_id": 45937417, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45937417", "by": "ankit01-oss", "date": "2025-11-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "open source and opentelemetry-native. Lots of our users have migrated from grafana", "excerpt": "you can check out: https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz open source and opentelemetry-native. Lots of our users have migrated from grafana to overcome challenges like having to handle multiple backends. p.s - i am one of the maintainers.", "context": "SigNoz maintainer", "use_case": "observability with OTEL", "switched_from": "", "story": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore"}], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45934940", "title": "I can't recommend Grafana anymore", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49686380", "title": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488654", "title": "Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041446", "title": "Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584429", "title": "Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47321579", "title": "OpenTelemetry for Rust Developers", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {}, "2025-12": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-01": {}, "2026-02": {}, "2026-03": {"recommend": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-04": {}, "2026-05": {}, "2026-06": {}, "2026-07": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-09": {"recommend": 1}, "2026-10": {}}, "quotes": [{"id": 795242466, "item_id": 49702654, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49702654", "by": "ElFitz", "date": "2026-09-14", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Works nicely with my existing Signoz", "excerpt": "https://github.com/lightless-labs/pessimal: I got bitten a few times too many by my headless VM running out of disk space, so I had Claude build a minimal OTel agent sending metrics to an OTel collector (Signoz for now), and an iOS / macOS app to query it at regular intervals. Works nicely with my existing Signoz, costs nothing extra, but I\u2019ve yet to test it against Honeycomb and Clickstack. Apps are in private TestF", "context": "", "use_case": "OTel metrics collection", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)"}, {"id": 791820786, "item_id": 49488799, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49488799", "by": "vpk11", "date": "2026-08-29", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well", "excerpt": "I use CLI tools for Git, Atlassian (ACLI), and Metabase, plus custom SigNoz shell scripts to drive API calls instead of an MCP server. This setup works very well at the moment for me.", "context": "", "use_case": "observability API calls", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Why do we need MCP?"}, {"id": 784669840, "item_id": 49041865, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041865", "by": "dabinat", "date": "2026-07-24", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great.", "excerpt": "I\u2019d recommend self-hosting because most SaaS providers charge or limit by usage and it can add up fast. I use both SigNoz and Sentry with OpenTelemetry. Why both? SigNoz has great dashboards and trace and metrics monitoring, but its alerting system isn\u2019t great. Sentry is great at alerting me to new issues and it also has other features like JS session replays that are nice. They just added metrics monitoring which I ", "context": "", "use_case": "traces and metrics dashboards", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are your current favorite monitoring and observability solutions?"}, {"id": 761350882, "item_id": 47584430, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47584430", "by": "kisamoto", "date": "2026-03-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz", "excerpt": "Claude Code supports using OpenTelemetry to gather some metrics including token usage, cost, user prompts and tool calls (unfortunately no system prompts). This is possible without custom certificates, MITM or proxies. However you do need something to collect, store and visualise the OTEL data. I use Grafana Alloy (running in Docker) and Grafana Cloud for this but you could use any OTEL provider including SigNoz. Lea", "context": "", "use_case": "OTEL data visualisation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Monitor Claude Code Usage with Grafana"}, {"id": 757949217, "item_id": 47371826, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47371826", "by": "wise0wl", "date": "2026-03-13", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Signoz is newer to the game.  I'm glad there are more competitors and vendors using OpenTelemetry natively.", "excerpt": "The OpenTelemetry spec is absolutely what folks have been waiting for for as long as I've been in computing (~20 years). A single standard that is implemented in nearly every popular language with very close feature parity. It's honestly wonderful to work with compared to the old vendor supplied frameworks. I took it upon myself to write a library for my current employer (4yrs ago now?) that abstracted and standardiz", "context": "", "use_case": "observability backend", "switched_from": "", "story": "OpenTelemetry for Rust Developers"}, {"id": 740483136, "item_id": 46280196, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46280196", "by": "gaurav12342345", "date": "2025-12-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "We ended up using SigNoz largely because: - It exposes a programmatic trace API", "excerpt": "A single agent request can fan out across sub-agents, tools, model calls, retries, and external APIs. When something goes wrong, logs aren\u2019t enough and raw traces aren\u2019t very helpful unless you can actually understand them. The hard part isn\u2019t emitting OpenTelemetry spans. That\u2019s easy. The hard part is turning high-cardinality agent traces into something a human can reason about. In our agent framework at Inkeep, we ", "context": "works at Inkeep on an AI agent framework", "use_case": "OTEL backend for agent traces", "switched_from": "", "story": "We built OTEL observability directly into our AI agent framework"}]}