In the not-too-distant past, the debate was between on-prem and cloud-native. You’re now faced with the choice of choosing between the different cloud infrastructure providers, and inevitably, someone will throw in the phrase “vendor lock-in”. And not having a response for the famed “vendor-lockin” sometimes leads to building things that are much more complex than required basis the stage that the product is in. In this one, I’d like to talk to you about how you can break out of the cursed vendor-lockin while using AWS ECS to manage your workloads. AWS ECS is a managed service ..read more

“The will must be stronger than the skill.” Muhammad Ali Welcome to our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 24! Last month, our team worked on the upcoming trace and logs explorer page. With the new update, our users will be able to drive deeper insights into their application performance quickly. We also attended open source focused meetups and published a cost comparison blog comparing SigNoz with other popular observability tools. Let’s dive in to see what humans at SigNoz were up to in the month of April 2023. What we’re working on?​ We’re working on building a new trace explorer and a ..read more

Democratize observability for engineering teams of all sizes! That’s the vision that drives us every day. SigNoz is open source, provides three signals (logs, metrics, and traces) under a single pane, and is OpenTelemetry-native. And it also costs lesser than other popular observability tools. We did a cost analysis of SigNoz and compared it with other vendors like DataDog, New Relic, and Grafana. SigNoz can provide up to 7x more value for money than vendors like Datadog and let your engineering team do so much more. Here are some key takeaways from our cost analysis: SigNoz can provide up t ..read more

As the growth lead of an open-source APM tool, I keep interacting with developers from companies of all shapes and sizes. I recently talked with a developer from a fintech startup in India. The startup provides a payment processing platform that enables businesses to accept payments from customers worldwide. For them, monitoring is critical, but the dev shared how limited they were when exploring an APM tool for their application. The reason? Reserve Bank of India. But what does RBI has to do with the monitoring tools of fintech firms? I was intrigued, so I dug further. The fintech space in I ..read more

In modern microservices-based applications, it is difficult to get an overview of how requests are performing across multiple services, infrastructure, and protocols. As companies began moving to distributed systems, they realized they needed a way to track requests in their entirety for debugging applications. Distributed tracing is a technology that was born out of this need. Fundamentally, context propagation helps in distributed system monitoring by passing a context object(a unique identifier and some other metadata) with a transaction across multiple software components. What is contex ..read more

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time.” Leo Tolstoy Welcome to our monthly product newsletter - SigNal 23! Last month, our team worked on improving the search capabilities across multiple tabs. We also made the logs tab more intuitive by adding color coding in the logs view. We presented SigNoz at an observability-focused meetup and crossed 12,000+ GitHub stars. Let’s dive in to see what humans at SigNoz were up to in the month of March 2023. What we shipped?​ Search is a critical aspect of an observability dashboard, and we want our users to get to what they want quickly. W ..read more

Both DataDog and Prometheus are application monitoring tools aimed to improve application performance. While DataDog is a proprietary SaaS vendor in the APM domain, Prometheus is an open-source metrics monitoring tool that was the second project to graduate from Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2018. Let us compare DataDog and Prometheus in this article. In this article, we will explore the differences between DataDog and Prometheus based on these categories: Getting started Monitoring use-cases User-experience and visualizations Pricing We will also explore the key features of DataDog ..read more

DataDog is a paid SaaS tool that provides a range of products for monitoring applications and tech infrastructure. While CloudWatch is an Amazon Web Services product that monitors applications running on AWS infrastructure, or using AWS services. What is CloudWatch?​ CloudWatch is an Amazon Web Services product that enables users to track, collect and analyze their performance and operational application data running on AWS services. You can use CloudWatch to collect and store logs, monitor application and infrastructure metrics. It also provides unified dashboards, alarm systems, and logs &a ..read more

Cloud has become the de-facto standard for new application development. Kubernetes solves many problems of modern-day cloud infrastructure. It has made microservices-based distributed software systems possible, enabling organizations to provide on-demand scaling. But at the same time, Kubernetes has also increased operational complexity. In simple terms, Kubernetes is a container orchestration tool. Container environments are dynamic and ephemeral. Monitoring a container-based environment is very different from monitoring a VM-based or physical machine-based environment. Setting up a robust o ..read more

Browser instrumentation refers to collecting and analyzing data about a user's interactions with a web browser. This type of instrumentation involves using specialized tools and techniques to gather information about how a website is being used, such as page load times, network requests, and user interactions. The data collected through browser instrumentation can be used to improve website performance, identify and troubleshoot errors, and gain insights into user behavior. In this tutorial, we will use OpenTelemetry to instrument a React browser application. OpenTelemetry Browser Instrumenta ..read more