Hey there 👋

This week's article will examine 5 open source alternatives to Datadog.

Datadog is the leading platform providing cloud-scale monitoring and security for metrics, traces and logs.

Though it gained much popularity, some open-source candidates deserve the spotlight, too.

I hope this article will allow you to understand more about these projects and make you think twice before choosing which platform you use.

If you are ready, let's get into it!

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Now that you have checked our Quests, let's jump into the open-source alternatives to Datadog. 🐶

Prometheus

Why should you consider it? Prometheus is designed for monitoring cloud-native setups. First, it has a self-sufficient architecture that does not rely on distributed storage. Second, it leverages PromQL for data querying - enabling high-speed output. Third, Prometheus has a unique metric collection model, which combines service discovery support and the feature to push data through an intermediary gateway. This allows it to monitor many systems and services simultaneously seamlessly.

What does it look like? You can take a sneak peek at the architectural overview behind what powers Prometheus.

How can I get started? You can download it here.

https://github.com/prometheus/prometheus

Netdata

Why should you consider it? Netdata is known to be an energy-efficient monitoring tool. It can collect metrics from ~800 integrations and still offer low-latency dashboards. Due to its energy efficiency, it is the ideal choice for projects with high resource usage. A neat feature is that Netdata uses machine learning to predict and prevent anomalies.

What does it look like? 👇

How can I get started? The downloading process may differ based on your operating system. You can find the downloading instructions here.

https://github.com/netdata/netdata

Grafana

Why should you consider it? Grafana allows you to query, visualise and create alerts on metrics, seamlessly integrating all of these features into tailor-made dashboards. Notifications can be sent to various platforms, including Slack, PagerDuty, VictorOps, and OpsGenie. You can find the extensive list of software that can be visualised and monitored from Grafana here.

What does it look like? Grafana has created Grafana Play, an area for you to test the platform and "play" with it. You can see a screenshot of it below. 👇

How can I get started? The installation guide can be found here.

https://github.com/grafana/grafana

SigNoz

Why should you consider it? SigNoz provides a platform for visualising metrics, traces and logs. It supports many programming languages through OpenTelemetry and allows you to monitor your application's performance. SigNoz's primary goal is to provide an integrated UI between metrics & traces and give advanced filtering and aggregation over traces.

What does it look like? The current UI looks as shown below.

How can I get started? Please follow the steps listed here to download SigNoz.

https://github.com/signoz/signoz

Thingsboard

Why should you consider it? Though ThingsBoard can monitor your business's data, its primary use case differs slightly. It is an IoT platform for data collection, processing, visualisation, and device management. This means it enables device connectivity via industry standard IoT protocols - MQTT, CoAP and HTTP- and supports cloud and on-premises deployments. With more than 30 customisable widgets, you can build end-user custom dashboards for most use cases.

What does it look like? This is an example of an energy tracking dashboard created with Thingsboard. ☘️

How can I get started? You can view the installation instructions here.

https://github.com/thingsboard/thingsboard

That's it for this one. ⚡️

I hope this article has brought you more insights into the alternatives for Datadog.

I suggest you try a few and see which platform best suits your needs.

In the meantime, please consider supporting these projects by starring them. ⭐️

We are not affiliated with them. We just think that great projects deserve great recognition.

See you next week,

Your Dev.to buddy 💚

Bap

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