[HN Gopher] Show HN: SigNoz - open-source alternative to DataDog...
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       Show HN: SigNoz - open-source alternative to DataDog, NewRelic
        
       Author : pranay01
       Score  : 465 points
       Date   : 2022-10-01 19:00 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | cebert wrote:
       | I like DataDog but it is prohibitively expensive for monitoring
       | serverless applications, even with negotiated rates. I don't
       | think their sales team has identified a reasonable way to bill
       | applications that entirety use serverless AWS services. We're
       | looking for alternatives. Paying for DataDog is many orders of
       | magnitude higher than our AWS bill.
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | Paying for DataDog is many orders of magnitude higher than our
         | AWS bill.
         | 
         | Wow! This is blowing my mind.
         | 
         | Do you this this case for most companies monitoring serverless
         | applications with DataDog, or there is something specific about
         | your infra which cause this
        
           | josephcooney wrote:
           | A tangentially related anecdote - I heard from a guy from MS
           | that if you turn on Azure's AKS monitoring without any
           | filtering of events applied the cost of the monitoring will
           | be significantly more than running AKS itself.
        
             | malkia wrote:
             | That might be okay, say you enable all for 10 - 20 seconds,
             | such that all traces are sampled, logs logged, etc, and
             | then it ramps down.
        
             | pranay01 wrote:
             | This is the default monitoring which comes with AKS setup
             | right?
        
             | sandermvanvliet wrote:
             | Yeah got burned by that once. Fortunately I had billing
             | alerts in place so we found it quick...
        
             | yodon wrote:
             | I had Azure AKS monitoring turned on for a minuscule,
             | essentially unused hobby project. After about four months
             | the monitoring costs suddenly exploded from about $4/mo to
             | about $4k/mo.
             | 
             | No idea what happened and MSFT support couldn't tell me
             | what was happening because at more than $100/day burn rate
             | on a hobby project I started deleting everything connected
             | with the effort as fast as possible.
             | 
             | All I know is my AKS wasn't exploding. Services were still
             | responsive and acting normally in their minuscule cluster,
             | this was just a logging cost explosion.
             | 
             | Also billing alerts are your friend.
        
           | cebert wrote:
           | The application I am currently working on is all lambdas ~
           | 45, DynamoDB, S3, CloudFront, Cognito, and SQS and SNS. My
           | employer has several serverless applications with relatively
           | moderate use, and I work on one of them. Our total cloud
           | costs for the product I work on for our
           | DEV/STAGE/PROD/SANDBOX environments is currently less than
           | $1,000/mo. Our estimated cost of DataDog monitoring for the
           | next year just on my application is at least 23k/yr using
           | negotiated rates. We don't have crazy traffic, but do have
           | global users invoking all of our lambdas at least once an
           | hour. DataDog charges a fixed monthly cost for each lambda
           | invoked at least once an hour on average. Then, you also need
           | to pay for ingestion, storage, and custom metrics. Just on my
           | product alone with multiple isolated environments, this gets
           | expensive.
           | 
           | Many other product teams at my work have lightly used
           | serverless apps. The DataDog costs simply aren't feasible for
           | serverless apps. We're actively looking into alternatives
           | such as just using CloudWatch, Elastic, etc as it's a huge
           | cost for us.
        
             | masterofmisc wrote:
             | Can you tell me what the difference is between your DEV and
             | SANDBOX environemnts is? Curious to know.
        
             | VectorLock wrote:
             | Wonder how much it would be if you just used all the native
             | AWS tools for things you get from Datadog.
        
               | pranay01 wrote:
               | As far as I understand, AWS native tools like Cloudwatch
               | are not as good
        
             | [deleted]
        
             | smetj wrote:
             | Time to look into what output DD delivers which drives
             | service/product decisions with financial impact and look
             | for an alternative to re-implement. Stop being hypnotized
             | by the fancy blinkenlights.
        
             | pranay01 wrote:
             | thanks for the detailed note.
             | 
             | I was just checking Datadog pricing for serverless, there
             | is says - $7.20 per active function per month. If you are
             | using 45 lambdas, is the number of functions much higher? I
             | am guessing ~200 or so?
             | 
             | Though I can see, how charging based on functions can
             | quickly shoot up the bill
        
               | cebert wrote:
               | The problem is we have 4 isolated environments so it's 4x
               | number of lambdas. Plus, since you only pay for lambdas
               | when they're running we also deploy developers PRs in AWS
               | so that we can test their API changes with integration
               | tests before merging those changes in. The fixed cost is
               | a killer. We have developers on our team in India,
               | Ukraine, and the US so even our dev environment is used
               | 24x7 essentially.
        
               | mustyoshi wrote:
               | Are you sure you need to monitor the PR lambdas? If
               | they're going to make it to one of the 3 environments
               | before prod.
        
               | xiwenc wrote:
               | What are the 4 isolate environments in your case? Dev,
               | test, accp, and prod? If so, you almost slash the cost by
               | 50% by only monitoring accp and prod. Can be accomplished
               | by introducing a toggle in your lambda's.
        
           | danielodievich wrote:
           | Absolutely. Two of my customers over last two years (a
           | hypergrowth startup and a crypto marketplace) both had
           | 20+MM/year DataDog bills, comparable in magnitude to both
           | their AWS spend (both were built on AWS) and Snowflake spend
           | (which was my area of focus). DataDog's wonderful yet it is
           | pricey and that's why they have that beautiful target on them
           | from all kinds of vendors.
        
             | pranay01 wrote:
             | Very interesting! I never thought DataDog would be close to
             | AWS spend
             | 
             | Were these also on AWS Lambda or something else (EKS?)
        
               | danielodievich wrote:
               | Both had everything you can possibly get from AWS and
               | then more. I didn't interact with Datadog much except for
               | once loading 4PB of archived DD data into Snowflake to
               | search through it to satisfy govt records request. That
               | was an illuminating project, Datadog can't handle that,
               | but Snowflake sure could.
        
           | vasco wrote:
           | It also blows my mind, we are also heavy Datadog users and
           | our Datadog bill is roughly 1/10 of the AWS one. Our
           | architecture isn't fully based on serverless because we like
           | to get work done, but I wonder if that's the only cause or if
           | they are using custom metrics wrong or something along those
           | lines.
           | 
           | If you're paying less than 10% of infra costs for monitoring,
           | you probably don't have good enough monitoring. But if you're
           | paying more than 25% of your infra costs for monitoring,
           | someone is not doing their job.
        
             | salil999 wrote:
             | > Our architecture isn't fully based on serverless because
             | we like to get work done
             | 
             | What do you mean by this?
        
               | tepitoperrito wrote:
               | I think he's being funny. I thought it was hilarious.
               | There are huge boons to productivity if you know your
               | stack. I don't know serverless so if I built anything
               | around it it would probably just be shiny object
               | syndrome.
        
         | victor9000 wrote:
         | I had the same experience with NR. I couldn't possibly justify
         | paying more for a developer tool than I do for the entirety of
         | operations.
        
       | dominotw wrote:
       | good to see solid oss projects coming out of india. I will def
       | keep an eye on this one.
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | thanks. do give it a try and let us know if you have any
         | feedback
        
       | pranay01 wrote:
       | We just released a major upgrade to SigNoz with support for Logs
       | management based on ClickHouse. Would love to get any feedback
       | from the community here on what you think and any questions you
       | may have for us
       | 
       | Many big companies like Uber and Cloudflare have been shifting to
       | ClickHouse as their main workhorse for Logs management seeing
       | much better performance. for e.g Cloudflare recently shifted from
       | Elastic to ClickHouse and are seeing 8x improvement in memory/cpu
       | resource requirement in ingestion.
       | 
       | This is our first release with Logs support and we have added
       | support for:
       | 
       | - Filtering logs based on fields
       | 
       | - Full text search in logs
       | 
       | - Live mode to see logs coming in realtime
       | 
       | - Detailed view of logs in table and json format with ability to
       | add filters quickly
       | 
       | - Ability to specify interesting fields which will be indexed by
       | default
        
         | chrisandchris wrote:
         | Question: Is it licensed under MIT? The license reads as it
         | could be MIT but there is no reference to it.
        
           | ankitnayan wrote:
           | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/blob/main/LICENSE
        
             | chrisandchris wrote:
             | Does not match the file I see when clicking "View License",
             | e.g. will not match the LICENSE file the next release may
             | have?
             | 
             | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/blob/develop/LICENSE
        
               | pranay01 wrote:
               | yes, upcoming release will have license which is
               | currently in `develop` branch
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | The ee/ folder is under proprietary license. Rest of the code
           | is under MIT license
        
             | chrisandchris wrote:
             | Thanks for the response. I've realized that the license
             | between the branch develop and main is not the same at the
             | moment.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | skanga wrote:
         | I tried installation on Windows 10 via Rancher-Desktop using
         | "other platform" docs but ran into issues with dependencies on
         | sh/bash. Are there any windows specific instructions?
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | hey, windows is not officially supported. If you have a
           | Ubuntu machine/Mac, you can try in that
           | 
           | https://signoz.io/docs/install/docker/#prerequisites
        
         | spaceman10 wrote:
         | Hi, I want to love this product. This will be the 3rd or 4th
         | time I have looked at the docs to figure out basic setup.
         | 
         | Each time I look into this. I look to see how it can report
         | CPU/Memory/Disk of the systems at large. When I read, all I
         | find on open telemetry and SigNoz is how to integrate with
         | application stacks.
         | 
         | Am I missing something fundamental in that SygNoz/OpenTelemetry
         | do not integrate with host level metrics? I really, really want
         | to use this product. But this extremely BASIC implementation to
         | use the service is 100% missing for documentation as far as I
         | can tell. Even the example page has nothing listed
         | https://signoz.io/docs/tutorials/ ...
         | 
         | So I am either trying to find out how to make SygNoz do
         | something it was not built to do... or the documentation has a
         | huge hole in it.
         | 
         | Let me know how to proceed, if you have time. It's appreciated
         | so that I dont keep walking down the wrong road and hoping to
         | find something useful.
         | 
         | Thanks!
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | Hey, thanks for writing. Our initial focus was on application
           | monitoring - that is why docs are more oriented towards it.
           | But I can understand you may find it tough to understand for
           | infra metrics (CPU/Memory/Disk)
           | 
           | As of now, there are couple of ways to do this: 1. You can
           | enable hostmetrics receiver in opentelemetry collector 2. You
           | can use something like prometheus node exporter and enable
           | prometheus receiver in opentelemetry collector
           | 
           | If you follow this for a VM setup, you should be able to get
           | your host metrics - https://signoz.io/docs/userguide/send-
           | metrics/#enable-a-spec...
           | 
           | If you are on k8s, check out this -
           | https://signoz.io/docs/tutorial/kubernetes-infra-metrics/
           | 
           | If it is still confusing, do drop by in our slack community (
           | https://signoz.io/slack) We are quite active there and should
           | be able to help you get started
        
         | mritchie712 wrote:
         | How are you dealing with join's in clickhouse? Do you just
         | avoid them all together?
         | 
         | We use clickhouse at Luabase and join performance is the only
         | weak point we've hit.
        
           | ankitnayan wrote:
           | Yes...we are avoiding join altogether. Currently we used join
           | in timeseries but we are probably moving away from that due
           | to perf. Single table is amazingly fast
        
       | gclawes wrote:
       | How's this compare to the grafana/prometheus/tempo/loki set of
       | tools?
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | You can find answers to some similar questions here -
         | https://signoz.io/docs/faqs/product/#how-is-signoz-different...
         | 
         | Let me know if you have a specific question which is not
         | addressed in the above link and will try to answer
        
       | FridgeSeal wrote:
       | This looks really good!
       | 
       | Might give this a spin next week, currently using NR, but it's
       | slow, expensive and the in-cluster collection services are
       | frustratingly fragile.
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | thanks, if you have any questions while setting things up, feel
         | free to drop by on our slack community -
         | https://signoz.io/slack
         | 
         | Also, can you explain a bit more on                 in-cluster
         | collection services are frustratingly fragile
         | 
         | do you mean the agent they use for sending application metrics
         | from clusters breaks down?
        
       | tomschwiha wrote:
       | Looks interesting, will have a look at it. Thank you!
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | Awesome! Do give it a try and let us know what do you think.
         | 
         | We also have an active slack community if you have any
         | questions on how to set up or have an feedback for us -
         | https://signoz.io/slack
        
       | gregwebs wrote:
       | Click house is a great DB but still not the best at storing
       | timeseries metrics. Do you have plans to incorporate a db
       | optimized for time series storage?
        
         | RhodesianHunter wrote:
         | Clickhouse is absolutely incredible at storing time series
         | metrics.
        
           | ankitnayan wrote:
           | What does your schema for metrics look like? Using
           | materialised views? I am particularly interested in storing
           | metrics with labels(key/val pairs) Eg, Prometheus metrics.
           | You can't flatten them out into columns due to high
           | dimensionality(can need millions of columns). Do you store
           | the labels in an array?
        
             | datalopers wrote:
             | Not the person you're replying to, but you can see how
             | SigNoz did it here [1]
             | 
             | Essentially you add: keys Array(String), values
             | Array(String) and write the pairs accordingly.
             | 
             | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/blob/develop/deploy/docker
             | -...
        
         | datalopers wrote:
         | I see this viewpoint occasionally but have never seen what
         | features a TSDB offers that Clickhouse can't do just as
         | effectively if not better?
        
           | hiyer wrote:
           | I would have thought better compression was one, but it looks
           | like Clickhouse now supports all the time series-optimized
           | encodings like delta and gorilla -
           | https://altinity.com/blog/2019/7/new-encodings-to-improve-
           | cl....
        
       | zrosenbauer wrote:
       | Logs be SUPER expensive... our biggest freaking expense
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | what do you use currently for logs?
        
       | ketzu wrote:
       | Is there any introduction to all the services that are included
       | in the docker-compose file [1]?
       | 
       | I wanted to give signoz a try, but the sheer amount of services
       | attached discouraged me, especially as I have to reconfigure them
       | all to work with my setup. (Don't run them directly on the host,
       | instead in a separated network, put the network interface behind
       | traefik, figure out which access they need, provide all the
       | configuration in a nice way without having to clone the full repo
       | just to have the configuration files.)
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/blob/develop/deploy/docker/...
        
         | rad_gruchalski wrote:
         | Not associated with the project but a quick look suggests: a
         | database (clickhouse), alertmanager, query-service, frontend
         | are signoz components, otel* and hotrod are for distributed
         | tracing. Otel stands for open telemetry
         | (https://opentelemetry.io/), hotrod is a tracing demo app from
         | jaeger: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/tree/main/examp
         | les/h....
         | 
         | Without thinking too much about it, I assume that: hotrod is a
         | demo data source pushing traces to the otel collector, which
         | stores data in clickhouse. Frontend fetches data from
         | clickhouse using the query service. Alert manager probably
         | looks at traces coming in and detects anomalies, so that you
         | can get real-time alerts when things don't look normal.
        
           | ketzu wrote:
           | Thank you for the quick explanation, that helps a lot and
           | gives me at least a starting point. Although sample services
           | surprise me in the suggested docker-compose from the "how to
           | install" section.
        
             | pranay01 wrote:
             | yeah, it's not ideal - but we kept it to give users who are
             | installing for the first time to get a hang of the product
             | 
             | You can easily remove the sample services if you want -
             | https://signoz.io/docs/operate/docker-standalone/#remove-
             | the...
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | The comment by rad_gruchalski is mostly accurate
         | 
         | SigNoz has the following components
         | 
         | - Frontend
         | 
         | - ClickHouse (datastore)
         | 
         | - Alert Manager (this is to monitor metrics and create alerts
         | which you configure in SigNoz)
         | 
         | - Query Service (which is the backend service which talks to
         | datastore & frontend)
         | 
         | - Otel collector ( which the collector provided by
         | opentelemetry to collect telemetry data)
         | 
         | The other two components for sample app which can be commented
         | out
         | 
         | - Hotrod ( which is a sample app)
         | 
         | - load generator
         | 
         | More details here -
         | https://signoz.io/docs/architecture/#architecture-components
        
       | codetrotter wrote:
       | They say:
       | 
       | > if you want to have a seamless experience between metrics and
       | traces, then current experience of stitching together Prometheus
       | & Jaeger is not great.
       | 
       | But I wonder if using Promscale
       | https://github.com/timescale/promscale would make Prometheus &
       | Jaeger not such a big problem as SigNoz imply.
       | 
       | Promscale readme:
       | 
       | > Promscale is a unified metric and trace observability backend
       | for Prometheus, Jaeger and OpenTelemetry built on PostgreSQL and
       | TimescaleDB.
       | 
       | Either way, SigNoz seems interesting indeed. And am glad to see
       | that SigNoz supports OpenTelemetry.
        
         | 0x457 wrote:
         | You don't even need Promscale for this. Grafana has support for
         | displaying information from both plus logs. As long as log
         | messages include TraceID is straightforward use Grafana for
         | debugging.
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | yeah, promscale is an interesting project with similar goal -
         | trying to bring together different signals ( only metrics &
         | traces for promscale) under one hood.
         | 
         | I have not explored the project in detail, but as far as I
         | understand it uses Grafana and Jaeger UI, so I am not sure how
         | seamless is the UI interaction, while SigNoz has a UI built
         | ground up for observability use cases.
        
         | ankitnayan wrote:
         | Basically, the choice of DB is different, relational vs
         | analytical DB. IMO clickhouse should be better at ingestion
         | rate and aggregation queries.
        
       | keb_ wrote:
       | I used New Relic for the first time at my current job, and while
       | service it provides to our team is invaluable, the UI is slow and
       | very confusing; I can never remember what button or menu to click
       | to get to where I need to go. The fact that it loads so slowly
       | just makes it worse.
       | 
       | So I am optimistic for alternative solutions like this!
        
         | jiggawatts wrote:
         | At $dayjob the devs use both Azure Application Insights and New
         | Relic. Comparing the two, I had the same comments: New Relic is
         | appears useful but is too slow in practice. The developers
         | generally avoid it in their day-to-day work, which defeats the
         | purpose entirely.
         | 
         | We're not in the US, so the cloud-hosted version of New Relic
         | is _especially_ slow because of the added latency of the trans-
         | oceanic network hop.
         | 
         | For comparison, Azure Application Insights can be deployed in
         | our own region. It's not massively faster, but for some UX
         | design reason it _feels_ faster and more pleasant to use. It
         | might be literally just the network latency, and nothing more,
         | but the end result is that it 's used more often.
         | 
         | Application Insights isn't perfect by any means:
         | 
         | - Deployment is a PitA and breaks regularly. The documentation
         | related to installing it is confusing, out-of-date, and will
         | guide you down dead ends. For example, I got the profiler
         | component working _once_ on virtual machines, then it broke,
         | and I can 't get it working again for the life of me.
         | 
         | - The underlying Log Analytics workspaces are crazy, _crazy_
         | expensive. They 're far more expensive than the competition,
         | which then makes high-level services like Sentinel and App
         | Insights built on top also too expensive for most orgs. For
         | comparison, Log Analytics is about 5x as expensive per GB as
         | AWS CloudWatch logs, and up to 30x as expensive as some other
         | similar services.
         | 
         | If Microsoft just fixed the installer and used reasonable
         | pricing for Log Analytics, the App Insights would be very hard
         | to beat, especially for .NET shops.
         | 
         | I'm hoping open-source tools like SigNoz force down the pricing
         | from "highway robbery" to merely "greedy".
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | > so the cloud-hosted version of New Relic is especially slow
           | because of the added latency of the trans-oceanic network
           | hop.
           | 
           | Curious, does the location of the server introduce the
           | latencies (as you mentioned you are not in US)? I would have
           | assumed the latency because of server location would be very
           | small.
           | 
           | Have you verified that the latency is actually because of the
           | trans-oceanic network hop?
        
             | jiggawatts wrote:
             | At least a hundred milliseconds of _additional_ latency is
             | unavoidable across any ocean crossing. It's just physics.
             | 
             | All US-hosted web services feel slow here. It's a baseline
             | sluggishness that permeates everything we use that is cloud
             | hosted.
             | 
             | The only exception is services that have local instances or
             | replicas of some sort.
        
               | pranay01 wrote:
               | I see, very interesting.
               | 
               | Is this latency deterring enough that you prefer running
               | things in your region and not prefer SaaS product which
               | are generally hosted in US/EU?
               | 
               | Or is this just a discomfort which you deal with?
        
               | jiggawatts wrote:
               | Personally speaking, yes. I tend to gravitate to locally
               | hosted services. In some cases it can be a night & day
               | difference.
        
             | dijit wrote:
             | Consider that each connection is a round trip (IE; hundred+
             | ms latency is multiplied by 3 due to handshakes being
             | 3-stage.).
             | 
             | Consider that every fetch of a resource may itself include
             | another resource (IE; a html page which contains a CSS
             | include).
             | 
             | Now consider that this happens recursively (IE from the
             | above example: a CSS include that itself includes a font or
             | an image).
             | 
             | It's very easy to get 1+s load times with transatlantic
             | latency alone.
        
               | pranay01 wrote:
               | thanks for sharing, I never thought this could be an
               | issue
               | 
               | Question: Does this increase in latency make cloud
               | services less interesting for companies which are not in
               | US? What kind of cloud services will be especially
               | affected
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | Cloud services usually have global availability, you
               | choose where you host.
               | 
               | A lot of people in Europe are using European datacenters.
               | 
               | That is not to say there's no issues: The consoles can be
               | unbearably slow at times. (Google Cloud being probably
               | the worst offender in my experience, despite being a fan
               | otherwise).
               | 
               | Amazon supports consoles in other regions, but if you use
               | `console.aws.amazon.com` then it is us-east; it doesn't
               | automatically change it for you.
               | 
               | Here's the list:
               | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/mgmt-
               | console.h...
               | 
               | Regarding making Cloud less interesting:
               | 
               | Europe basically follows whatever SV is doing, to make a
               | crass comment: an article could be produced from SV
               | saying eating poop would make better engineering and
               | European "tech" companies would assuredly start buying up
               | the sewage systems.
               | 
               | Even when it doesn't make sense; we seem to follow.
        
               | capableweb wrote:
               | After using AWS for more than 10 years in various
               | capacities, I've never seen that the console is available
               | in multiple regions! Sometimes it is dog slow for me when
               | I'm in a various different geographic locations, I hope
               | this newly learned fact will make my experience slightly
               | better in the future, thanks for sharing that!
               | 
               | It does make me wonder though, why not automatically
               | redirect people to the console that is closest to them?
               | They could done anything from Anycast DNS to showing a
               | simple little notification showing people there was an
               | alternative possibly closer to them when logging in, but
               | as far as I know, nothing is done about this.
        
               | everfrustrated wrote:
               | GP is a little confused. The AWS console always redirects
               | you to the the console hosted in the same region as the
               | resources you're viewing.
               | 
               | But the initial login request to AWS goes via us-east-1
               | by default.
               | 
               | AWS has more recently published the list of login
               | endpoints to use should us-east-1 be offline.
        
         | Hamuko wrote:
         | There's a reason why they offer a New Relic certificate, so you
         | can prove that you've learned to use the product they're
         | selling.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | It's actually getting worse than better. Newrelic one is super
         | confusing and the new pricing made us nope out of there and
         | adopt datadog for both metrics and apm. The interface is so
         | much better.
        
           | icelancer wrote:
           | Yeah I agree. It's weird. New Relic was a godsend for us but
           | every iteration of pricing, UI changes, UX... it just gets
           | worse.
        
             | bigcat12345678 wrote:
             | What's your use case with New Relic? New Relic has been
             | deemed inferior to DataDog across the comments here,
             | wondering how much value you are getting from New Relic
             | nowadays.
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | Isn't the new pricing of New Relic much more affordable now?
           | Or they introduce some weird condition on the number of
           | seats, etc
        
             | viraptor wrote:
             | Ah yes, sorry, I forgot that was very context specific.
             | With the new plans they killed our _very old_ plan. Which I
             | guess is fair... But still, DD comes out cheaper.
        
               | pranay01 wrote:
               | got it
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | thanks for the kind words. To give it a try and let us know if
         | you have any feedback/questions.
         | 
         | We also have an active slack community if you have any
         | questions on how to set up or have an feedback for us -
         | https://signoz.io/slack
        
       | InTheArena wrote:
       | Is there any outlier analysis on this? That's a key advantage of
       | DataDog and NewRelic.
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | By outlier analysis, do you mean anomaly detection in metrics
         | to send alerts?
         | 
         | As of now, we have fixed threshold based alerting capabilities
         | - but more advanced ML/seasonality based anomaly detection is
         | on the roadmap. we are tracking this here -
         | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/issues/295
         | 
         | What type of outlier analysis do you generally do in
         | DataDog/NewRelic?
        
       | reilly3000 wrote:
       | I just learned about SigNoz. I spend a lot of time flipping
       | between New Relic and Splunk, and my company spends a ton on
       | both. I'm interested to hear from users and learn if it's prod
       | ready as a New Relic alternative. I'm especially interested in
       | something that could run locally so I can profile using the same
       | tools that run in prod. Any feedback?
        
       | andrewmcwatters wrote:
       | I don't know what other people's experience has been with
       | DataDog, but the user interface experience I had with it was
       | definitely reminiscent of something produced from a dog's rear
       | end.
       | 
       | Definitely a product where no one in the org said "no" to an
       | idea. Felt very Atlassian.
        
         | vasco wrote:
         | Been using it for ~5 years full time and the UI is one if the
         | main reasons to use Datadog vs hand rolling it based in
         | Grafana. The productivity of developers creating datadog
         | dashboards vs in other tools was way better.
         | 
         | Have you ever timed how long it takes a normal user to do
         | certain things easily, say during an incident, or you're just
         | crapping on the CSS?
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | Curious, what areas do you think the DataDog UX is especially
           | better compared to Grafana? Also, which flows do you use the
           | most in DataDog
        
         | mustyoshi wrote:
         | I have the opposite opinion. We used Cloudwatch originally but
         | switched to Datadog and it was night and day. Datadog has a
         | beautiful interface for logs, metrics, and dashboarding.
        
         | almenon wrote:
         | I have the opposite feeling - to me it looks nice and better
         | than Dynatrace or elastic.
        
         | aloknnikhil wrote:
         | Second this. It's pretty terrible when you use it at scale
         | particularly. Eg: If you have a monitor with some scopes that
         | you use for exceptions, it gets gnarly in the UI when you have
         | like 50 of them. And the inconsistent UI. Notebooks are cool
         | but so half-assed in their features that it kind becomes
         | useless for anything other than basic charts. Oh and feature
         | discovery is a pain too. It took me so long to figure out a way
         | to add a second Y-axis to my charts.
        
           | pranay01 wrote:
           | Interesting. do you mean this by scopes -
           | https://docs.datadoghq.com/api/latest/scopes/ ?
        
             | aloknnikhil wrote:
             | Not exactly. I'm talking about this workflow.
             | https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/mute-datadog-alerts-
             | planned-d...
             | 
             | You use specific tags to mute a monitor by adding a scope.
             | This does not scale well with the UI.
        
               | pranay01 wrote:
               | ah, got it. Thanks
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | Yeah, we have had some of our users mentioning that DataDog has
         | become too bulky and too many bells and whistles.
         | 
         | Curious though, what specific features/UX did you not like in
         | DataDog?
        
         | waynesonfire wrote:
         | gatta keep polishing that turd! there is a promo packet that
         | needs filling.
        
       | jakswa wrote:
       | Goodness I hope this is good because I will make my company
       | gobble it upppp if so.
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | feel free to test it out. We have an active slack community as
         | well if you have any questions on how to setup etc.
         | https://signoz.io/slack
        
         | saintfiends wrote:
         | We thought so too until we found out it doesn't support any
         | kind of SSO
         | 
         | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/issues/1188
        
           | bogota wrote:
           | I mean if that is the single thing stopping your company from
           | using it then just add support for it. The cost of DD monthly
           | bill more than supports spending a week or less it would take
           | to add
        
             | Aeolun wrote:
             | That would be so nice. But if they're planning to 'add it
             | to our enterprise plans' then I doubt your PR would be
             | accepted. Leaving you to manage a fork.
        
               | mdaniel wrote:
               | If they truly wanted to build an open source community
               | around their product, the "enterprise" part would just be
               | "we host it for you" and not "we gatekeep features that
               | we think we can extort big companies to pay"
               | 
               | That is: I wouldn't hold off on a PR just because they
               | said they're going to get around to it; if the PR works,
               | and is merged, that's one less part they have to write.
               | If they don't merge it, then the bad faith you're
               | discussing will be a concrete fact and not speculation,
               | and will serve as a warning to others not to bother
               | submitting more PRs
        
               | sheen wrote:
               | Interesting points. Sounds like you've got some sound
               | experience in the politics of open source
        
             | rad_gruchalski wrote:
             | That or just put the frontend behind a reverse proxy with
             | sso.
        
               | hunter2_ wrote:
               | SSO is about making a user account inside a service
               | provider (e.g. TFA) which mirrors that same user account
               | in the identity provider (e.g. Okta). A reverse proxy
               | isn't able to write to the upstream application's user
               | store or otherwise assert the identity of the current
               | user to the upstream application, as far as I'm aware. It
               | could do some kind of binary proxy-or-don't-proxy based
               | on a valid assertion from the IdP, but the application
               | would just attribute all traffic to a single user.
               | 
               | Or is there some kind of gateway standard that I'm
               | unaware of?
        
               | Fiahil wrote:
               | Yes, OAuth-proxy, Nginx external auth, ...
        
               | rad_gruchalski wrote:
               | Have a look at something called external, or forward
               | auth. For example 1) Traefik: https://doc.traefik.io/trae
               | fik/middlewares/http/forwardauth/, 2) Nginx:
               | https://docs.nginx.com/nginx/admin-guide/security-
               | controls/c..., 3) Envoy: https://www.envoyproxy.io/docs/e
               | nvoy/latest/configuration/li....
               | 
               | This can be used to add whatever authn/authz you require
               | to apps that don't even support authn/authz. I'm using
               | Traefik ForwardAuth with Keycloak for Jaeger SSO in a
               | couple of places.
        
       | daigoba66 wrote:
       | Curious how it compares to https://github.com/uptrace/uptrace
       | 
       | And are there any other similar projects.
        
       | yawniek wrote:
       | what drove you to move away from MIT licencing?
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | Since we follow an open core business model, we wanted the
         | flexibility to introduce proprietary features in the future.
         | Hence, we added a folder ee/ which will have proprietary code.
         | 
         | The rest of the code is still MIT licensed. And if you remove
         | the ee/ folder, the project would work without any issue
         | 
         | This licensing model is very similar to what folks like Gitlab
         | and PostHog do today
        
           | lhoff wrote:
           | Don't do that. Open Core is going to hurt you. Especially if
           | things like SSO are paid only. I understand you want to make
           | money and you deserve that but open core will hurt you more
           | then it will help you.
           | 
           | - Open core means no direct path from testing to using (and
           | paying). If I want to make a case for a software to be
           | included in our stack I don't want to constantly run into
           | paywalls while trying out the product but I also don't want
           | to go through the hoops of getting a licence (because of
           | internal bureaucracy).
           | 
           | - You steer away users that cost you nothing but help you
           | spread to word and report issues and might even provide a PR.
           | I'm talking about OpenSource Projects, student organisations
           | and companies with limited resources (NGOs, early stage
           | startup's). I used to be head admin in a student
           | organisation. We developed our own internal tools and only
           | relied on open-source components. I know of at least two
           | cases where other students got to know the tools and after
           | they finished university joined companies and introduced the
           | very tools we used to their employees resulting in paid
           | support contracts.
           | 
           | - It creates tempting opportunities for investors to force
           | you into ruining the open source tier. In the beginning you
           | only have features behind the paywall that are useful to big
           | enterprises but if your business is not growing fast enough
           | (from the perspective of investors) they might force you to
           | push more users to be paying customers. That might help in
           | the short term but will ruin your reputation in the long run.
           | 
           | - Paying for services (aka insurance to get help if something
           | goes haywire) is easier to justify with execs then paying an
           | unreasonable amount for that one feature that is behind the
           | paywall. ("Can't you just make it work without it"). Its a
           | purely psychological argument but decision processes in
           | companies are not always rational and your allies are the
           | devs and you should be helping them make a case to buy your
           | product.
        
             | pranay01 wrote:
             | If I want to make a case for a software to be included in
             | our stack I don't want to constantly run into paywalls
             | while trying out the product but I also don't want to go
             | through the hoops of getting a licence (because of internal
             | bureaucracy).
             | 
             | Yeah, understand the use cases you are pointing to. We are
             | planning to introduce a foss only version of the product
             | for users who know that they won't be need the enterprise
             | version. It will not have any enterprise bits, and you
             | could just keep using it as you want. Something similar to
             | this - https://github.com/PostHog/posthog-foss
        
           | goodpoint wrote:
           | What a pity. I could have used it if it was under GPLv3 or
           | AGPL.
        
             | bigcat12345678 wrote:
             | AGPL is contagious I heard, seems quite dangerous to ppl
             | planning to make preparatory software bolted onto an open
             | source core.
        
               | goodpoint wrote:
               | That's wrong. Licenses are not bacteria.
               | 
               | First, AGPL only requires to release changes ONLY to the
               | existing AGPL codebase and ONLY if you are providing it
               | as a network service.
               | 
               | Second, the whole idea of virality is a huge misnomer.
               | There is no such thing as one thing "infecting" another
               | in copyright law. GPL/AGPL cannot magically make another
               | piece of software change license.
        
           | goodpoint wrote:
           | > open core business model, we wanted the flexibility to
           | introduce proprietary features in the future
           | 
           | From the website: "Why get locked-in with SaaS vendors like
           | DataDog when you can use Open source?"
           | 
           | You expect users to trade one form of lock-in for another
           | one?
        
             | pranay01 wrote:
             | The lock-in we are pointing to is the lock-in because of
             | the proprietary SaaS vendors instrumentation library which
             | is embedded into your code and difficult to get out of.
             | 
             | We are natively based on opentelemetry which is emerging as
             | the industry standard for instrumentation. So, you can
             | change product you used for backend and visualising and
             | storing your telemetry data very easily
        
       | jaxn wrote:
       | I am hesitant to run my APM on the same infra as our application.
       | I love the idea of reducing an external dependency/cost, and it
       | looks easy enough to add to our Kubernetes. It just seems a
       | little like host our own status page on the same servers as our
       | SaaS.
       | 
       | Is this something you have an answer for?
        
         | pranay01 wrote:
         | We recommend users to run SigNoz in a separate k8s cluster/VM.
         | In this way, even if your applications servers/clusters get
         | overloaded, your observability stack (SigNoz) will still be
         | running seamlessly.
         | 
         | Many of our users use SigNoz in a similar fashion.
        
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