Openobserve

OpenObserve is an open-source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring. A cost-effective alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch with 140x lower storage costs and single binary deployment.

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<a href="https://openobserve.ai"><img src="https://openobserve.ai/img/logo/o2-logo-readme.svg" alt="OpenObserve"></a> Open source Datadog alternative for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring. Modern observability platform: 10x easier, 140x lower storage cost, high performance, petabyte scale. <a href="https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve" target="_blank"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/last-commit/openobserve/openobserve" alt="Last Commit"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/stargazers" target="_blank"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/stars/openobserve/openobserve" alt="GitHub Stars"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/issues" target="_blank"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/issues/openobserve/openobserve" alt="GitHub Issues"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/graphs/contributors" target="_blank"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/contributors/openobserve/openobserve" alt="Contributors"> </a> <a href="https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/releases" target="_blank"> <img src="https://img.shields.io/github/v/release/openobserve/openobserve" alt="GitHub Release"> </a>

OpenObserve (O2) is a cloud-native observability tool built for logs, metrics, traces, analytics, and Real User Monitoring (RUM). It's designed as a cost-effective alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch for teams that need full observability without the complexity or cost.

Why OpenObserve?

OpenObserve is a single observability tool for all your monitoring needs. Here's why teams choose OpenObserve:

| Benefit | Description | | --------| ------------| | 140x Lower Storage Cost | Parquet columnar storage + S3-native architecture dramatically reduces costs vs Elasticsearch | | Single Binary Deployment| Get running in under 2 minutes. No complex cluster setup required | | OpenTelemetry Native| Built on OpenTelemetry standard—no vendor lock-in| | Unified Platform| Logs, metrics, traces, RUM, dashboards, alerts in one tool| | High Performance | Better query performance than Elasticsearch on 1/4 the hardware| | SQL + PromQL | Query logs/traces with SQL, metrics with SQL or PromQL—no proprietary query language| | Built in Rust | Memory-safe, high-performance, single binary|

Cost Comparison: OpenObserve Vs Elasticsearch

🎥 Introduction Video

🏗️ Architecture

OpenObserve achieves 140x lower storage costs and high performance through its modern architecture:

Parquet columnar storage: Efficient compression and query performance
S3-native design: Leverages inexpensive object storage with intelligent caching
Built in Rust: Memory-safe, high-performance, single binary deployment
Partitioning, indexing and smart caching: Reduces search space by up to 99% for most queries
Native multi-tenancy: Organizations and streams as first-class concepts with complete data isolation
Stateless architecture: Enables rapid scaling and low RPO/RTO for disaster recovery

This architecture delivers 140x cost savings while providing better performance than Elasticsearch.

Scale & Deployment

Thousands of concurrent users can query a single cluster simultaneously
Single binary scales to terabytes - unique in the observability space
High Availability mode scales to petabytes for the most demanding workloads
Multi-region deployments with cluster federation via Super Cluster architecture (Enterprise feature)
Federated search across regions and clusters (Enterprise feature)
Capacity planning tools to size deployments for your workload

High Availability & Disaster Recovery

Deploy in High Availability mode with clustering for mission-critical workloads requiring maximum uptime and performance.

Low RPO/RTO: OpenObserve's stateless architecture with S3-backed storage enables very low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO). Stateless nodes can be rapidly restarted, and data durability is guaranteed by S3's 99.999999999% (11 nines) durability. That's a lot of nines.

Read detailed architecture documentation →

Read enterprise deployment guide →

Features

For a full list of features, check the documentation.

Logs Management

OpenObserve provides a centralized log management solution with full-text search, SQL queries, and powerful filtering. Built on Parquet columnar storage for 140x lower storage costs than Elasticsearch. Instantly search through all your logs using quick filters and a powerful query builder. Create dashboards from log data and set up alerts. Read more →

Distributed Tracing

Distributed tracing is essential to troubleshoot issues in microservices applications. Powered by OpenTelemetry, tracing in OpenObserve helps you track user requests across services to identify performance bottlenecks. See user requests in a detailed breakdown with Flamegraphs and Gantt Charts. Click on any span to see the entire trace and understand where issues occurred. Read more →

Metrics & Dashboards

Ingest metrics from your infrastructure or applications and create customized dashboards. 19+ built-in chart types plus custom charts for 200+ visualization variations. Query metrics with SQL or PromQL. Add multiple queries and combine them with formulae. Read more →

Frontend Monitoring (RUM)

Real User Monitoring with performance tracking, error logging, and session replay. Understand exactly what your users experience. Read more →

Alerts

Get notified when anything unusual happens in your application. Set alerts on any telemetry signal (logs, metrics, traces), create thresholds, and configure notification channels. Advanced features like alert history and anomaly detection help you identify issues before they reach your customers. Read more → <img width="3024" height="1714" alt="image" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/69571d98-ccab-4382-9d1e-ac60f0855e81" />

Pipelines

Enrich, redact, reduce, or normalize data on ingest. Stream processing for logs-to-metrics conversion and more. No external tools required. Read more →

Getting Started

OpenObserve Cloud (Fastest Way)

Get started in minutes without managing infrastructure. Free tier includes up to 200 GB/day ingestion. Get Started Free →

🐳 Docker:

docker run -d \
      --name openobserve \
      -v $PWD/data:/data \
      -p 5080:5080 \
      -e ZO_ROOT_USER_EMAIL="root@example.com" \
      -e ZO_ROOT_USER_PASSWORD="Complexpass#123" \
      public.ecr.aws/zinclabs/openobserve:latest

For other ways to quickly install OpenObserve or use OpenObserve cloud, check quickstart documentation.

For installing OpenObserve in High Availability mode, check High Availability deployment documentation.

Production Ready

OpenObserve is battle-tested in production environments worldwide:

Thousands of active deployments across diverse industries
Largest deployment: 2+ PB/day ingestion
Single binary scales to terabytes—unique in the observability space

Customer Stories →

Comparisons to Familiar Tools

OpenObserve vs Datadog

| Aspect | OpenObserve | Datadog | | ----- | ----- | ----- | | Deployment | Self-hosted or Cloud | SaaS only | | Pricing model | Per-GB (free up to 200GB/day) | Per-host + per-GB | | Open source | Yes (AGPL-3.0) | No | | OpenTelemetry | Native OTLP | Supported | | Query language | SQL + PromQL | Proprietary | | Vendor lock-in | None | High |

OpenObserve is a Datadog alternative that gives you full control over your data and costs.

OpenObserve vs Elasticsearch

| Aspect | OpenObserve | Elasticsearch | | ----- | ----- | ----- | | Storage cost | 140x lower | High (hot/warm/cold tiers) | | Setup complexity | Single binary | Complex cluster management | | Query language | SQL | Lucene/KQL | | Hardware requirements | 1/4 the resources | High memory/CPU |

OpenObserve achieves 140x lower storage costs through Parquet columnar format and S3-native architecture.

OpenObserve vs Splunk

| Aspect | OpenObserve | Splunk | | ----- | ----- | ----- | | Licensing | Open source | Expensive enterprise licensing | | Deployment | Single binary or HA cluster | Complex | | Query language | SQL + PromQL | SPL (proprietary) | | Cost | Predictable, low | Unpredictable, high |