I recently read this thread in the CNCF slack from someone wanting to send metrics and traces directly to Postgres. Reasonable enough right? After all once your data is in postgres you can query it to your heart’s content. And isn’t the general culture of OpenTelemetry that you should be able to do all of Observability without resorting to SaaS tools?

The thread, however, is pretty universally opposed to this approach; and I have to say that I agree. While several replies recommend SaaS tools as endpoints to receive OpenTelemetry data, and the tools mentioned are great, there are also fully open-source and self-hosted tools that will make your life much much easier than trying to import directly to Postgres.

Kubernetes and OpenTelemetry are both CNCF projects, and both are closely associated with modern microservice architecture. Despite their connection, there isn’t a single cohesive solution to monitoring your Kubernetes cluster with OpenTelemetry.

Large teams that use complex clusters in production have generally ended up building their own tools for monitoring both their infrastructure and application code. See Intuit’s talk from the recent Open Source Summit on how they built tools to easily summarize golden signals.

While reading a GitHub issue on the OpenTelemetry Collector about trying to send two versions of a metric, one with higher and one with lower cardinality, it occurred to me that we’ve never written on this blog about what is high-cardinality data exactly and how it matters to your OpenTelemetry observability.

"Every action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become.”
James Clear

Welcome to the 26th edition of our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 26! Our team shipped important updates to improve user experience. We were also pleasantly surprised by the number of community-led tutorials featuring SigNoz.

Community events are a great way to meet people and learn what they are upto. I was at KCD Bangalore last week and met a bunch of people. Among many conversations, one stood out. An engineer and architect turned entrepreneur was interested in hearing feedback about the new product he has been working on.

“When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds aren’t in your favor.”
Elon Musk

Welcome to the 25th edition of our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 25! Our team shipped important upgrades to SigNoz, like new trace and logs query builder. We also attended many events and had a small get-together after months.

OpenTelemetry can be used to trace Go applications that use Kafka to find performance issues and bugs. OpenTelemetry is an open-source project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) that aims to standardize the generation and collection of telemetry data. Telemetry data includes logs, metrics, and traces.

In the not-too-distant past, the debate was between on-prem and cloud-native. You’re now faced with the choice of choosing between the different cloud infrastructure providers, and inevitably, someone will throw in the phrase “vendor lock-in”. And not having a response for the famed “vendor-lockin” sometimes leads to building things that are much more complex than required basis the stage that the product is in. In this one, I’d like to talk to you about how you can break out of the cursed vendor-lockin while using AWS ECS to manage your workloads.

Jaeger is an open-source end-to-end distributed tracing tool for microservices architecture. On the other hand, Elastic APM is an application performance monitoring system that is built on top of the ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana, Beats). In this article, let's explore their key features, differences, and alternatives.

“The will must be stronger than the skill.”
Muhammad Ali

Welcome to our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 24!

Last month, our team worked on the upcoming trace and logs explorer page. With the new update, our users will be able to drive deeper insights into their application performance quickly.