SigNoz

SigNoz is an open source observability platform positioned explicitly as a Datadog alternative, bringing traces, metrics and logs into one OpenTelemetry-native product available as SigNoz Cloud or self-hosted on a customer's own infrastructure.

The self-hosting option is what makes the cost argument credible rather than rhetorical. Any vendor can claim to be cheaper; a product that can be run on the customer's own hardware sets a ceiling on what the hosted version can charge, because the alternative is always available. SigNoz publishes a customer describing a Datadog trial ending with a bill over two thousand dollars, which is the moment that sends teams looking.

Usage-based pricing with retention as a separate dimension is the sensible structure for this workload. Logs and traces are 0.30 dollars per gigabyte ingested and metrics 0.10 dollars per million samples, with retention selectable from 15 days through 30, 90 and 180 days to a full year. Separating retention from ingestion matters because the two have completely different value profiles: recent data is queried constantly and old data is kept for compliance.

Agent-native observability is the newer positioning, covering both a team's services and the AI agents running alongside them, built on open standards throughout. Published customers include Cisco, which describes using SigNoz as a first-class dependency in a new agent framework, alongside teams that migrated from Grafana and CloudWatch. SigNoz Cloud starts at 49 dollars a month including 49 dollars of usage, and the self-hosted version is free.