OpenObserve

OpenObserve is an open source observability platform unifying logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring, session replay and error tracking, claiming 140 times lower cost than conventional alternatives, used by more than 9,000 companies.

Cost is the entire proposition and the mechanism behind the claim is worth understanding rather than dismissing. Observability spend is dominated by storing and indexing telemetry, and most established platforms index aggressively so that any query is fast, which is expensive at volume. A design that stores compactly and accepts more work at query time inverts that trade, and for the very large majority of telemetry that is written and never read, it is clearly the right trade.

Getting started in one command is a genuine differentiator for evaluation. A single docker run line brings up a working instance on a laptop, against competitors requiring an account, a sales conversation and an agent rollout before anything can be seen. For a team assessing options, being able to try it in five minutes changes which products get shortlisted at all.

Session replay and real user monitoring alongside backend telemetry is unusual in an open source project, and it means front-end and back-end investigation happen in one tool rather than two. OpenObserve Cloud charges 0.50 dollars per gigabyte ingested and 0.01 dollars per gigabyte queried, with 30 days retention for non-metrics data included and extension at 0.02 dollars per gigabyte per additional 30 days, on a 14 day trial. The self-hosted project is free and has passed 21,000 GitHub stars.