Skip to main content

SigNoz Intro

NOTE: THIS IS AN EXTENSION OF ORIGINAL SIGNOZ INTRODUCTORY PAGE, I HAVE MODIFIED AND ADDED SOME NEW CONTENT.​

Welcome to SigNoz’s documentation portal! Below, you’ll find information for beginners and experienced SigNoz users. If you can’t find what you are looking for, or have an issue not covered here, we’d love to hear from you[slack link]. If you are new to observability, please take a look at the Related Links section below.

SigNoz is an open-source application performance monitoring tool that helps you monitor your applications and troubleshoot problems. SigNoz uses distributed tracing to gain visibility into your software stack.

The 3 pillars of Observability​

  • Metrics are measures of critical system values, such as CPU utilization or average write latency to persistent storage.

  • Logs are files that record events in a system, such as the start of a subprocess or the trapping of an error.

  • Traces provide performance data about tasks that are performed by invoking a series of services. They are particularly important in distributed systems, such as microservices architectures.

Did you know?

Good news folks, SigNoz gives you all 3, yes.

Wondering how? Read on.

Features​

With SigNoz, you can do the following:

  • Monitor application metrics such as latency, requests per second, error rates
  • Monitor infrastructure metrics such as CPU utilization or memory usage
  • Track user requests across services
  • Set alerts on metrics
  • Find the root cause of the problem by going to the exact traces which are causing the problem
  • See detailed flame graphs of individual request traces

See Features page for more details.

How Does SigNoz Work?​

SigNoz collects data using OpenTelemetry, an open-source observability solution. Therefore, SigNoz supports all the frameworks and languages supported by OpenTelemetry. You can find the complete list of supported languages on the Instrumentation page of the OpenTelemetry documentation.

Then, SigNoz aggregates all the collected data, and you use the dashboard to see all the metrics and traces related to your application.

Why we built SigNoz?​

  • Metrics + Traces in single pane
  • Powerful trace filtering and aggregation capabilities
  • Out of Box like SaaS, requiring minimal dev efforts
  • Scalable stream processing architecture (Kafka + Druid)
  • Set Retention rule easily from Dashboard
  • ~ 10x cheaper than DataDog [cost benchmark]
  • Open source and hence you control the data

Architecture - Image and Explanation​

A little briefing about how it architecture

SigNoz includes the following components:

  • OpenTelemetry Collector: Collects telemetry data from your services and applications.
  • ClickHouse: An open-source, high performance columnar OLAP database management system.
  • Query Service: The interface between the front-end and ClickHouse
  • Frontend: The user interface, built in ReactJS and Typescript.

To learn more about the architecture of SigNoz, see the Architecture page.

Why SigNoz uses OpenTelemetry​

Traces, Metrics, Logs

  • Create and collect telemetry data from your services and software, then forward them to a variety of analysis tools.

Drop-In Instrumentation

  • OpenTelemetry integrates with popular libraries and frameworks such as Spring, ASP.NET Core. Express, and more!

Open Source, Vendor Neutral

  • OpenTelemetry is adopted and supported by industry leaders in the observability space.

Why SigNoz uses ClickHouse for storing Observability data?​

  • Wide tables with each query processes large number of rows but a few columns
  • Running aggregate queries
  • Distributed columnar datastore and blazing fast queries
  • Compression capabilities
  • Hot and cold storage
  • PromQL like query model for reading metrics data from ClickHouse

Why we chose Apache Druid?​​

  • Needed analytical DB to run aggregates on trace data
  • Realtime ingestion from Kafka
  • 3 types of Observability data into 1 datastore
  • Individual components being scalable
  • Writing to cost-effective S3 for deep storage
  • Proven to handle scale. Used by AirBnB, Lyft, Netflix, Pinterest

Fore more, refer here

Screenshots:​

Screenshots of UI of Signoz Dashboard and of various tabs (3-4 images only).

Get Started​

Perform the following steps to get started with SigNoz and instrument your first application: