SigNoz - Open-source alternative to New Relic
Tags: devops, kubernetes, microservices, monitoring
Published: 2021-09-27 13:06:33

If you're looking for an open-source alternative to New Relic, then you're at the right place. SigNoz is a perfect open-source alternative to New Relic. SigNoz provides a unified UI for both metrics and traces with advanced tagging and filtering capabilities.

[![SigNoz GitHub repo](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8yroh39ngk6sz6tv3z9y.png)](https://bit.ly/2WkkmL4)

In today's digital economy, more and more companies are shifting to cloud-native and microservice architecture to support global scale and distributed teams. But distributed systems also make it impossible for engineering teams to track how user requests perform across services. Application performance monitoring tools provide the visibility needed to resolve performance issues quickly in distributed systems.

New Relic is a great SaaS tool when it comes to application performance monitoring. But there are a few challenges when it comes to enterprise SaaS products, and it's just not a great fit for every company.

A relatively newer concept in the field of application performance monitoring is observability. Making a system observable is the pursuit of achieving a state of proactiveness to solve unknown issues. Logs, metrics, and traces are usually considered the three pillars of observability.

Some of the key features of good observability tools are:

- Out of the box application metrics
- Way to go from metrics to traces to find why some issues are happening
- Seamless flow between metrics, traces & logs — the three pillars of observability
- Filtering of traces based on different tags and filters
- Ability to set dynamic thresholds for alerts
- Transparency in pricing

## Why choose an open-source alternative to New Relic?
APM and observability tools are critical tools in a developer's kit. These tools improve developer efficiency, save bandwidth by resolving issues quickly, and increase developer productivity.

An open-source product is always a better choice for any developer tool. Some of the key advantages of open-source developer tools are:

- **Open codebase**
Developers can judge the quality of the code of the tool they want to choose and work with.

- **Extensibility**
If an extra feature or customization is required, developers can build on top of the open-source tool without waiting for the enterprise support team to include their request in the next product cycle.

- **Community support**
One of the best parts about open-source projects is the community. An example is <a href = "https://opentelemetry.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" target="_blank" ><b>OpenTelemetry</b></a>, which is becoming the world standard for generating and managing telemetry data in distributed systems.

- **Transparency**
With open-source projects, you know what you're dealing with. There is no black box.

- **On-prem installation**
If your data privacy policies are stringent, you can use open-source tools within your infra with no fear of breaching data privacy laws like GDPR.

But most open-source projects don't provide a great user experience as SaaS products do. It takes a lot of time and effort to get them working, figuring out the long-term storage, etc.

And that's where SigNoz shines. It is very simple to get started, supports multiple tech-stack, and comes with a SaaS-like web user experience.

## Key Features of SigNoz - a New Relic alternative

Some of our key features which makes SigNoz vastly superior to current open-source products and a great alternative to New Relic are:

- Out of the box application metrics
- Seamless flow between metrics & traces
- Filtering based on tags
- Custom aggregates on filtered traces
- Detailed Flamegraphs & Gantt charts
- Natively built to support OpenTelemetry
- Transparent usage Data

### Out of box application metrics

Get p90, p99 latencies, RPS, Error rates, and top endpoints for a service out of the box.

![SigNoz dashboard showing popular RED metrics](https:/signoz.io/img/blog/common/signoz_charts_application_metrics.png)<figcaption>SigNoz UI showing application overview metrics like RPS, 50th/90th/99th Percentile latencies, and Error Rate</figcaption>

### Seamless flow between metrics & traces

Found something suspicious in a metric, just click that point in the graph & get details of traces that may be causing the issues. Seamless, Intuitive.

![Seamless flow between metrics and traces](https:/signoz.io/img/blog/2021/08/metrics_to_traces_signoz-min.png)<figcaption>Move from metrics to traces at any point of time which needs more analysis</figcaption>

### Filtering based on tags

For example, you can find latency experienced by customers who have customer_type set as `premium`.

![Filtering based on tags](https:/signoz.io/img/blog/2021/08/tags_based_filtering_signoz-min.png)<figcaption>Filter traces for a specific user group using tags</figcaption>

### Custom aggregates on filtered traces

Create custom metrics from filtered traces to find metrics of any type of request. Want to find p99 latency of customer_type: premium who are seeing status_code:400. Just set the filters, and you have the graph.

![Custom aggregates on filtered traces](https:/signoz.io/img/blog/2021/08/metrics_on_filtered_traces-min.png)<figcaption>Find custom aggregates on filtered traces</figcaption>

### Natively built to support OpenTelemetry

SigNoz is built to support OpenTelemetry natively. OpenTelemetry is becoming the world standard when it comes to generating and managing telemetry data(logs, metrics, and traces). 

Some of the key advantages of using OpenTelemetry are:

- Reduces performance overhead on your application to generate and manage telemetry data
- Supports multiple popular programming languages like Java, Javascript, C++, Go, Python, etc.
- Provides libraries and agents to auto-instrument popular libraries and frameworks requiring minimal changes to your codebase
- Backed by technology giants like Google, Microsoft, and other big cloud vendors.
- No vendor lock-in. Freedom to switch to new backend analysis tools by using relevant exporters

### Transparent usage Data

You can drill down details of how many events is each application sending or at what granularity so that you can adjust your sampling rate as needed and not get a shock at the end of the month (case with SaaS vendors many times)

![Transparent usage data](https:/signoz.io/img/blog/2021/08/transparent_usage_data-min.png)<figcaption>SigNoz provides usage explorer so that you are always informed about your usage</figcaption>

### Detailed Flamegraphs & Gantt charts

Detailed flamegraph & Gantt charts to find the exact cause of the issue and which underlying requests are causing the problem. Is it a SQL query gone rogue or a Redis operation is causing an issue?

![Detailed Flamegraphs & Gantt charts](https:/signoz.io/img/blog/common/signoz_flamegraphs.png)<figcaption>Spans of a trace visualized with the help of flamegraphs and gantt charts in SigNoz dashboard</figcaption>

## Getting started with SigNoz

If you have docker installed, getting started with SigNoz just takes three easy steps at the command line:

```jsx
git clone https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz.git
cd signoz/deploy/
./install.sh
```

You can read more about deploying SigNoz from its [documentation](https://signoz.io/docs/deployment/docker/).

If you liked what you read, then check out our GitHub repo 👇

[![SigNoz GitHub repo](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/8yroh39ngk6sz6tv3z9y.png)](https://bit.ly/2WkkmL4)

Our slack community is a great place to get your queries solved instantly and get community support for SigNoz. Link to join 👇

[SigNoz slack community](https://bit.ly/signoz-slack)