[HN Gopher] OpenObserve: Observability platform for logs, metric...
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       OpenObserve: Observability platform for logs, metrics, traces,
       analytics
        
       Author : thunderbong
       Score  : 75 points
       Date   : 2024-10-23 18:10 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | ewuhic wrote:
       | How does it compare to Grafana suite?
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | You should read this - https://openobserve.ai/blog/openobserve-
         | vs-grafana
        
           | viraptor wrote:
           | That's an interesting take for OpenObserve, but for me in an
           | ops role it misses the compatibility. I appreciate that with
           | Grafana I can choose a specific backend and configure it as
           | required in my environment. I know other systems can reach
           | the same database because they have known APIs. I also know I
           | can move to another store with the same front-end if the
           | owners pull an Elastic/Redis.
           | 
           | OO integration may save me a couple of days of setup, but
           | long-term it's a dangerously limiting idea / lock-in.
        
             | prabhatsharma wrote:
             | You are in the same danger with Grafana (Front end,
             | Elasic/Redis fate and lock in) as you are with OpenObserve.
             | No difference there.
        
       | 1oooqooq wrote:
       | just forwarding the hosts logs from journald to a openobserve
       | running in a vm on that host requires using an agent that will
       | cause you more reasons to have to observe a log than anything
       | else.
       | 
       | And syslog/syslogng are also problematic to ingest.
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | OpenObserve is built for centralized logging - Not really for
         | installing it on every linux host. If that is your use case, I
         | would recommend you to look for other tools.
        
       | MrDarcy wrote:
       | Another one for the sso wall of shame - https://sso.tax/
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | You should read this - https://openobserve.ai/blog/sso-tax
        
           | Eridrus wrote:
           | I think you don't understand the core argument re the SSO
           | Tax, which is that security is a positive sum good, which is
           | why it should not be the feature used for price
           | discrimination.
           | 
           | Not all products have other good features to use for price
           | discrimination, so I have some sympathy for vendors here, but
           | I think it often indicates laziness in thinking about what
           | they can use to do the necessary price discrimination.
        
             | prabhatsharma wrote:
             | I do understand it's super important for security, and I
             | want large companies who have ample money and spend a lot
             | on security to pay me as well for it. If you are running
             | OpenObserve in your basement or are a small startup you get
             | it for free in OpenObserve and stay secure.
        
         | osigurdson wrote:
         | How should companies monetize products? Maybe people should
         | just go back to full commercial models, not sure.
        
           | prabhatsharma wrote:
           | Most people who talk about SSO Tax don't really care for it's
           | values but rather want free stuff. I have had conversations
           | with multi-billion dollar companies who would avoid paying a
           | single dollar to support open source companies and bring SSO
           | tax into conversation.
           | 
           | On our part OpenObserve offers free SSO on our cloud service
           | to anyone and Free SSO for anyone using enterprise version if
           | they ingest under 200 GB/Day (6 TB/Month).
        
             | MajimasEyepatch wrote:
             | The problem with not offering SSO on lower tiers is that it
             | can make it hard to test into a new service. I might want
             | to try out a new tool with one team for a couple of months
             | and see how it goes before recommending adoption for a
             | broader group. I don't want to have to sign a year-long
             | six-figure contract just to try something out. Sometimes
             | you can work out a trial period with the sales team, but
             | that's not always easy, and it puts a strict ticking clock
             | on things that doesn't work in all situations.
        
             | yourapostasy wrote:
             | _> ...conversations with multi-billion dollar companies..._
             | 
             | Slight clarification here. Might not apply in
             | OpenObservability's case but might help others on their
             | journey to enterprise sales with their projects.
             | 
             | Those are typically conversations with managers holding $X
             | purchasing authority, typically like $500K for a US
             | director'ish level, within multi-billion dollar companies.
             | These managers usually aren't averse to spending on open
             | source projects. They're averse to cutting a check not tied
             | to a support contract with responsive, polite, helpful
             | support with published support policies at 0300h local time
             | on a break-fix line with 75 other people from other support
             | teams in the company watching. A surprising number of open
             | source projects won't offer that guarantee, and instead
             | only offer the option to "donate" with vague promises of
             | priority support. More projects are getting better at this
             | more recently, but it takes a surprising amount of red tape
             | to onboard as a vendor into these organizations, and a lot
             | of open source teams don't have the appetite for putting up
             | with that.
             | 
             | Until kind of recently, the conversation switching to the
             | SSO Tax is really about accessing that level of guaranteed
             | support delivery.
        
               | prabhatsharma wrote:
               | Thanks @yourapostasy . Agree with you for the most part.
               | 
               | Not all managers are averse to paying, but many are. I
               | have had discussions with Director/Sr. Director and VP
               | level folks in these companies. I have been paid and I
               | have been denied.
               | 
               | Our biggest customer is a fortune 10 company and we are
               | able to offer the kind of support that they need. It
               | indeed takes a lot to provide that kind of support,
               | though, and would be difficult for most small open source
               | projects to do.
        
           | terminalbraid wrote:
           | That's the company's problem.
           | 
           | They're entitled to their business model. They're not
           | entitled to it working. They're not entitled to someone
           | figuring out a business model for them if people don't like
           | it.
        
         | Groxx wrote:
         | SSO often costs quite a lot to maintain, given how widely
         | varied the systems are. Seems reasonable to charge for an
         | optional high-complexity and high-maintenance-burden feature.
        
           | terminalbraid wrote:
           | Are you referring to the development cost or just the "keep
           | SSO wired to other orgs in for our cloud product"?
           | Development-wise, SSO standards don't change much and aren't
           | terribly difficult to get up an running if you stick to oauth
           | and saml.
           | 
           | By not offering that in a self-hosted open source version
           | where the maintenance is delegated to the user turns this to
           | a naked cash grab.
        
         | nhumrich wrote:
         | How is this on the SSO tax wall of shame? They support it SSO
         | on their free tier.
        
       | hijinks wrote:
       | does anyone use this?
       | 
       | I'm really starting to get sick of companies that claim they
       | operate at petabyte at scale and find you need to spend 400k a
       | month to support that scale.
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | Thousands of active deployments globally.
         | 
         | How many open source log systems work at PB scale given any
         | number of resources? Also FWIW, OpenObserve can ingest data at
         | 28 MB/Sec/Core (We are working on optimizing it even more) and
         | ingesting 1 PB of data would cost just $435 based on on-demand
         | prices (AWS m7g family).
        
           | terminalbraid wrote:
           | That doesn't answer the question of _who_? A (rightly)
           | cynical reading of what you posted could just be  "thousands
           | of active deployments" you did for yourself to prove
           | benchmarks.
        
             | prabhatsharma wrote:
             | Machines I would use for benchmarking would go down after
             | some time and won't be active.
        
               | djbusby wrote:
               | Still didn't answer the "who" part.
        
               | prabhatsharma wrote:
               | We will publish many names on our website soon.
        
           | Veserv wrote:
           | Why is it only 28 MB/core-second?
           | 
           | Is that production rate, inbound bandwidth, rate to
           | persistence, rate to processed, or rate to display?
        
             | prabhatsharma wrote:
             | Compute power is required to process and store the incoming
             | data.
             | 
             | It's not "only 28 MB/Sec/Core". Try doing same with
             | Splunk/Elasticsearch - You won't go past 5 MB/Sec/Core
             | (Typically it will be lower) on their best day.
        
               | Veserv wrote:
               | To what state?
               | 
               | Suppose I have 28 GB of trace data in memory on a machine
               | and then I fire that off. What do I have after 1000
               | seconds?
               | 
               | Do I just have a file of 28 GB of raw trace?
               | 
               | Do I have 28 GB of raw trace in memory ready to be
               | indexed?
               | 
               | Do I have a data structure in memory ready to be
               | searched?
               | 
               | Do I have the full trace information rendered on my
               | screen (or a aggregated visualization derived after
               | processing all the data)?
               | 
               | If it is the first, that would be ridiculously slow. If
               | it is one of the latter ones, then it would depend on
               | what querying operations are fast.
               | 
               | 28 MB/core-second makes no sense without the context of
               | what you can do quickly after the "processing" is done.
        
               | prabhatsharma wrote:
               | Too much to give all details in an HN thread. To simplify
               | the conversation, Data will be persisted and usable for
               | individual searches and aggregations. I would welcome you
               | to our slack workspace for any further questions you may
               | have - https://short.openobserve.ai/community
        
       | niux wrote:
       | Had a pretty bad experience with this. The web app is very buggy
       | and frustrating.
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | What bugs? Care to file a GitHub issue?
        
       | wiradikusuma wrote:
       | How is it compared to Signoz?
        
         | mdaniel wrote:
         | AGPLv3 versus MIT Expat + open core for one thing
         | 
         | https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/blob/v0.12.1/LICE...
         | 
         | https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz/blob/v0.56.0/LICENSE
        
       | prabhatsharma wrote:
       | Thanks @thunderbong for the post.
       | 
       | We have spent over 2 years building OpenObserve into a simple,
       | highly usable and efficient observability tool. You could run it
       | using a single binary that provides all the functionality of
       | logs, metrics, traces, front end monitoring, dashboards (18
       | different chart types), alerts and pipelines.
       | 
       | OpenObserve is being used by startups, mid tier enterprises and
       | fortune 100 companies. There are thousands of active
       | installations of OpenObserve globally.
       | 
       | Folks have replaced Elasticsearch, Splunk, Graylog, Datadog ,
       | Newrelic and more for OpenObserve.
       | 
       | Comment from a user -
       | 
       | We moved from 5 node OpenSearch cluster to single node
       | OpenObserve and measured using our actual everyday queries, which
       | are reasonably complex queries (1 to 5 conditions applied) over
       | our real logging data. We see that typically they complete in
       | about the same time. OpenObserve costs us 10 times less though
       | (instances + storage)
       | 
       | Also, we are currently working on replacing one of the world's
       | largest splunk installations.
       | 
       | p.s. I am one of the maintainers of OpenObserve. Feel free to ask
       | questions. I will be happy to answer them. You can also visit our
       | slack workspace at https://short.openobserve.ai/community for
       | discussions.
        
       | ethanwillis wrote:
       | How does the storage cost for 3 nodes stay exactly the same as
       | for 1 node for openobserve?
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | By using object storage (Think s3 and similar) and not
         | replicating data for HA (Not needed if using s3) which is done
         | by legacy systems like Elasticsearch and Splunk.
        
       | gclawes wrote:
       | No SSO in open-source, pass. I'll stick w/ Grafana
        
         | prabhatsharma wrote:
         | You should read - https://openobserve.ai/blog/sso-tax and
         | https://openobserve.ai/blog/openobserve-vs-grafana
        
           | NewJazz wrote:
           | I've read articles like that time and time again. Doesn't
           | change my requirements.
        
             | prabhatsharma wrote:
             | God bless you my friend. Thanks for the comment.
        
             | apitman wrote:
             | I'm curious what are your requirements? Their SSO tax
             | appears to be structured in such a way that only large
             | enterprises would have to pay.
        
               | Volundr wrote:
               | How so? This chart [1] has SAML under enterprise with no
               | price tag other than "get in touch"
               | 
               | [1] https://openobserve.ai/pricing
        
               | apitman wrote:
               | I'm going off the article linked above:
               | https://openobserve.ai/blog/sso-tax
        
               | Volundr wrote:
               | Fair enough. I couldn't find information of self-hosting
               | enterprise on their site, but did in the GitHub
               | repository [1] and 200GB is indeed a lot. At the same
               | time it's also a non-starter for me. I'm not going to
               | install "enterprise" anything where I'm going to start
               | depending on it, and one day the price will go up to ???.
               | 
               | [1]
               | https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve?tab=readme-ov-
               | fil...
        
           | Volundr wrote:
           | > enterprise SSO solutions like Okta are not free for users
           | and cost a lot of money for organizations to implement and
           | use.
           | 
           | There are free and open source solutions like Keycloak and
           | Zitadel. I don't dispute they are less common than Okta and
           | Entra, but the definitely exist and are deployed in the real
           | world. My workplace (state government) uses Keycloak for
           | example.
           | 
           | Another thing that the article doesn't really touch is that
           | SSO is locking a security best practice, important for an
           | organization of any size, behind a paywall. With SSO, when
           | someone leaves the organization you can disable their
           | singular account and be confident they are locked out of your
           | shared folders, gitlab, jira, etc, etc, rather than having to
           | manually track down and disable each one, with a high
           | likelihood of missing something. This is important for an
           | organization of any size > 1 from a bootstrapped startup all
           | the way to fortune 500. Hiding it behind higher cost makes it
           | more likely that an org will try to do without and have a
           | security breach as a result.
           | 
           | I also take issue with:
           | 
           | > Developing and maintaining SSO solutions requires
           | significant investment in research, development, and
           | infrastructure.
           | 
           | Having done it myself, this is overstated. No feature is free
           | but implementing a SAML or OAuth flow is not THAT much work,
           | nor does it represent a huge amount of ongoing maintenance.
           | 
           | I actually don't mind the SSO tax too much in cases where
           | it's the differentiator between free or open source vs paid.
           | I find it far more egregious when it's a product that already
           | has a cost and SAML auth jacks up the price 2-10x. I don't
           | think the blog post is a particularly good discussion of the
           | tradeoffs though.
        
       | cshark007 wrote:
       | used this on self-hosted and ingested 150GiB daily and absolutely
       | no issues, fancy UI and more buttons are not needed if you get
       | the value from ingestion speed.
        
       | max_streese wrote:
       | How are you folks related to Anguilla? Couldn't really find
       | anything AI specific about OpenObserve so I am guessing the
       | domain is for other reasons?
        
       | _fat_santa wrote:
       | Funny I was actually shopping around for an logging platform
       | yesterday and ended up going with Grafana. The thing that sold it
       | (for now) is their generous free tier, though if I had to self-
       | host (which I intend to do eventually), this seems like a much
       | easier thing to self host (and I really really like that it's
       | just one binary)
        
       | __turbobrew__ wrote:
       | How does this better than grafana? Loki -> logs Tempo -> traces
       | Prometheus/mimir -> metrics
       | 
       | I know personally of several companies which use this stack with
       | tens of thousands of nodes. Everything runs on object storage
       | which means it is easy to scale up, and you can move between
       | storage providers as long as they implement the S3 API. The
       | grafana ecosystem is very sticky as well. If I download some
       | random helm chart it most likely will come with a grafana
       | dashboard which I can easily import and instantly have dashboards
       | and alerts for the helm chart.
        
         | __turbobrew__ wrote:
         | I see you address this in a blog post: "You will also hear of
         | LGTM stack (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) which is a pretty good
         | stack for observability. Each of these components are separate
         | open source tools built by grafana labs."
         | 
         | Not very convincing why I wouldn't go for the LGTM stack which
         | has been proven to be effective.
        
           | prabhatsharma wrote:
           | By all means, if LGTM works for you stay with it.
           | 
           | For those looking at much more simplicity, and much higher
           | performance OpenObserve is the way to go. Many folks have
           | moved from Loki to OpenObserve due to performance issues with
           | Loki. Many have moved from LGTM stack completely to
           | OpenObserve. Many have chosen to use Grafana as a front end
           | for OpenObserve too.
           | 
           | Take a look at how easy it can be to build dashboards in
           | OpenObserve.
           | 
           | It takes time for community and ecosystem to build for great
           | products. Grafana started in 2014. OpenObserve started in
           | 2022.
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-23 23:01 UTC)