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SigNoz - Open-source alternative to New Relic

· 7 min read
Ankit Anand

If you're looking for an open-source alternative to New Relic, then you're at the right place. SigNoz is a perfect open-source alternative to New Relic. SigNoz provides a unified UI for metrics, traces and logs with advanced tagging and filtering capabilities.

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In today's digital economy, more and more companies are shifting to cloud-native and microservice architecture to support global scale and distributed teams. But distributed systems also make it impossible for engineering teams to track how user requests perform across services. Application performance monitoring tools provide the visibility needed to resolve performance issues quickly in distributed systems.

New Relic is a great SaaS tool when it comes to application performance monitoring. But there are a few challenges when it comes to enterprise SaaS products, and it's just not a great fit for every company.

Some of the challenges with tools like New Relic includes:

  • It is cloud-only, so not suitable for companies that have concerns with sending data outside their infra
  • For any small feature, you are dependent on their roadmap. We think this is an unnecessary restriction for a product which developers use. A product used by developers should be extendible
  • Pricing plans of enterprise tools can sometimes leave you in a lurch with frequent changes.

Users discussing pain points with New Relic.

Reddit post discussing issues about pricing model of New Relic
What's the catch with New Relic? (Source: Reddit)

A relatively newer concept in the field of application performance monitoring is observability. Making a system observable is the pursuit of achieving a state of proactiveness to solve unknown issues. Logs, metrics, and traces are usually considered the three pillars of observability.

Some of the key features of good observability tools are:

  • Logs, metrics, and traces under a single pane of glass
  • Out of the box application metrics
  • Way to go from metrics to traces to find why some issues are happening
  • Seamless flow between metrics, traces & logs — the three pillars of observability
  • Filtering of traces based on different tags and filters
  • Ability to set dynamic thresholds for alerts
  • Transparency in pricing

Why choose an open-source alternative to New Relic?

APM and observability tools are critical tools in a developer's kit. These tools improve developer efficiency, save bandwidth by resolving issues quickly, and increase developer productivity.

An open-source product is always a better choice for any developer tool. Some of the key advantages of open-source developer tools are:

  • Open codebase
    Developers can judge the quality of the code of the tool they want to choose and work with.

  • Extensibility
    If an extra feature or customization is required, developers can build on top of the open-source tool without waiting for the enterprise support team to include their request in the next product cycle.

  • Community support
    One of the best parts about open-source projects is the community. An example is OpenTelemetry, which is becoming the world standard for generating and managing telemetry data in cloud-native applications.

  • Transparency
    With open-source projects, you know what you're dealing with. There is no black box.

  • On-prem installation
    If your data privacy policies are stringent, you can use open-source tools within your infra with no fear of breaching data privacy laws like GDPR.

But most open-source projects don't provide a great user experience as SaaS products do. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them working, figuring out the long-term storage, etc.

And that's where SigNoz shines. It is very simple to get started, supports multiple tech-stack, and comes with a SaaS-like web user experience.

Key Features of SigNoz

Some of our key features which makes SigNoz vastly superior to current open-source products and a great alternative to New Relic are:

  • Visualise Traces, Metrics, and Logs in a single pane of glass
  • Monitor application metrics like p99 latency, error rates for your services, external API calls, and individual endpoints.
  • Find the root cause of the problem by going to the exact traces which are causing the problem and see detailed flamegraphs of individual request traces.
  • Run aggregates on trace data to get business-relevant metrics
  • Filter and query logs, build dashboards and alerts based on attributes in logs
  • Monitor infrastructure metrics such as CPU utilization or memory usage
  • Record exceptions automatically in Python, Java, Ruby, and Javascript
  • Easy to set alerts with DIY query builder

Application metrics

Get p90, p99 latencies, RPS, Error rates, and top endpoints for a service out of the box.

SigNoz dashboard showing popular RED metrics
SigNoz UI showing application overview metrics like RPS, 50th/90th/99th Percentile latencies, and Error Rate

Seamless flow between application metrics & traces

Found something suspicious in a metric, just click that point in the graph & get details of traces that may be causing the issues. Seamless, Intuitive.

Seamless flow between metrics and traces
Move from metrics to traces at any point of time which needs more analysis

Advanced filters on trace data

Under our traces tab, you can analyze the traces data using filters based on tags, status codes, service names, operation, etc.

Using tags, you can find latency experienced by customers who have customer_type set as premium.

Filters on trace data
Use advanced filters to analyze your trace data

Custom aggregates

Create custom metrics from filtered traces to find metrics of any type of request. Want to find p99 latency of customer_type: premium who are seeing status_code:400. Just set the filters, and you have the graph.

Custom aggregates on filtered traces
Find custom aggregates on filtered traces

Flamegraphs & Gantt charts

Detailed flamegraph & Gantt charts to find the exact cause of the issue and which underlying requests are causing the problem. Is it a SQL query gone rogue or a Redis operation is causing an issue?

Detailed Flamegraphs & Gantt charts
Spans of a trace visualized with the help of flamegraphs and gantt charts in SigNoz dashboard

Logs Management

SigNoz provides Logs management with advanced log query builder. You can also monitor your logs in real-time using live tailing.

Logs tab in SigNoz
Logs tab in SigNoz comes equipped with advanced logs query builder and live tailing

Transparent usage Data

You can drill down details of how many events is each application sending or at what granularity so that you can adjust your sampling rate as needed and not get a shock at the end of the month (case with SaaS vendors many times)

Transparent usage data
SigNoz provides usage explorer so that you are always informed about your usage

Native OpenTelemetry support

SigNoz is built to support OpenTelemetry natively. OpenTelemetry is becoming the world standard when it comes to generating and managing telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces).

Some of the key advantages of using OpenTelemetry are:

  • Reduces performance overhead on your application to generate and manage telemetry data
  • Supports multiple popular programming languages like Java, Javascript, C++, Go, Python, etc.
  • Provides libraries and agents to auto-instrument popular libraries and frameworks requiring minimal changes to your codebase
  • Backed by technology giants like Google, Microsoft, and other big cloud vendors.
  • No vendor lock-in. Freedom to switch to new backend analysis tools by using relevant exporters

Getting started with SigNoz

SigNoz cloud is the easiest way to run SigNoz. Sign up for a free account and get 30 days of unlimited access to all features.

Try SigNoz Cloud CTA

You can also install and self-host SigNoz yourself since it is open-source. With 16,000+ GitHub stars, open-source SigNoz is loved by developers. Find the instructions to self-host SigNoz.


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