A unified observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring that deploys as a single binary. It uses Parquet columnar storage and S3-compatible architecture to target lower storage costs compared to alternatives like Elasticsearch.
Project overview
Single binary deployment targets simpler setup for telemetry pipelines, while S3-native architecture and columnar storage target reduced storage costs and resource usage.
Project type
Evaluation & Observability
Use cases
Data Analysis
Deployment
Refer to project documentation
License
AGPL-3.0
Best for
Operations teams and developers seeking a self-hosted observability platform with SQL and PromQL querying capabilities.
Key capabilities
Provides log management with full-text search, SQL queries, filtering, dashboards, and alerts using Parquet columnar storage.
Tracks user requests across microservices to identify performance bottlenecks using OpenTelemetry, visualized with Flamegraphs and Gantt Charts.
Ingests infrastructure or application metrics to create dashboards using SQL or PromQL with multiple queries and formulas.
Real User Monitoring for performance tracking, error logging, and session replay to analyze user experience.
Allows setting alerts on telemetry signals, creating thresholds, and configuring notification channels with anomaly detection and history.
Enrich, redact, reduce, or normalize data on ingest with stream processing, including logs-to-metrics conversion.
Limitations and risks
All ingested data is immutable; individual records cannot be modified or deleted, only entire retention periods can be dropped.
Advanced security features like SSO and RBAC are restricted to the Enterprise Edition.
Getting started
Setup is documented as easy due to single binary deployment. You can get running using Docker, for example by executing 'docker run -d -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' and opening http://localhost:5080.