Comprehensive Monitoring with Open Source Tools: Our Journey to Industry-Standard Monitoring

In our quest to set up a comprehensive monitoring solution for all our backend applications, we explored various premium tools like New Relic and Datadog. While these tools offer robust features, they quickly become cost-prohibitive at scale.

Exploring Open Source Alternatives

We then turned our attention to open source tools such as Elasticsearch, the ELK stack, ClickHouse, and Grafana. Although these tools are powerful, setting them up and integrating them to match the capabilities of standard APM platforms like New Relic and Datadog—such as tracing, latency metrics, error tracking, and performance analytics—proved to be complex and time-consuming.

Discovering SigNoz

After extensive research, we discovered SigNoz, an open source monitoring platform that offered all the features we needed, including:

• Tracing
• Auto exception tracking
• Latency metrics
• Service dependency analysis
• Customizable dashboards

SigNoz uses OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability framework for cloud-native software. OpenTelemetry provides a standardized way to collect telemetry data such as metrics, logs, and traces, allowing for easy switching between monitoring tools in the future if needed. Additionally, it benefits from a wealth of libraries, documentation, and community support.

Deploying SigNoz in Kubernetes

We deploy most of our applications in Kubernetes clusters, and SigNoz offers excellent Helm charts for deploying SigNoz collectors in a Kubernetes cluster, enabling auto-instrumentation without modifying application code.

Conclusion

By leveraging SigNoz and OpenTelemetry, we established a comprehensive, cost-effective monitoring solution that rivals industry-standard platforms. This approach not only saved costs but also ensured flexibility and scalability for our backend applications. With SigNoz, we achieved robust monitoring capabilities, enhancing our ability to maintain high performance and reliability across all services.