Open-source alternatives to Skywalking

Pinpoint is a distributed application performance monitoring and tracing system. It functions as an application performance monitor and topology visualizer designed to analyze the execution behavior of large-scale distributed applications. The system uses bytecode instrumentation to monitor applications without requiring changes to the original source code. It captures call stacks and request flows across interconnected services to visualize system dependencies and generate real-time architectural maps of communication patterns. The platform covers a broad range of observability capabilities

OpenObserve is a unified observability data platform designed to ingest, store, and analyze logs, metrics, and traces. It functions as a cloud-native monitoring tool that centralizes telemetry from diverse sources, including standard collectors and cloud service providers, into a single, scalable system. By utilizing a columnar storage engine backed by object storage, the platform enables efficient long-term data retention and high-performance analytical querying. The platform distinguishes itself through deep integration with artificial intelligence, allowing users to query data using natura

SigNoz is a full-stack observability platform designed to collect, store, and visualize metrics, logs, and distributed traces in a unified environment. It leverages OpenTelemetry-based data collection to ingest telemetry from diverse sources using vendor-neutral protocols, ensuring interoperability across complex microservices architectures. The platform utilizes a high-performance columnar storage engine to enable rapid aggregation and filtering, providing a centralized backend for monitoring application health and performance. What distinguishes the platform is its focus on automated instru

Cat is a distributed application performance monitoring tool and tracing framework designed to track transactions, latency, and health across distributed services. It functions as a Kubernetes-native monitoring stack that utilizes multi-language monitoring clients and a real-time alerting system to maintain system visibility. The system provides monitoring clients for Java, Go, Python, Node.js, and C++ to collect performance metrics and trace data. It distinguishes itself by sampling request flows to record call chains and identify bottlenecks, while using a monitoring engine to trigger immed

Zipkin is an open-source distributed tracing system designed to collect, store, and visualize timing data across complex service architectures. It provides a platform for monitoring request lifecycles, enabling developers to identify latency bottlenecks and performance issues by tracking operations as they move through heterogeneous service environments. The system distinguishes itself through a standardized data model and a pluggable storage architecture that supports various backend databases. It utilizes sampling strategies to manage telemetry volume and employs asynchronous collection met

Coroot is an observability platform and Kubernetes performance monitor that utilizes eBPF to automatically collect metrics, logs, and traces without requiring manual code instrumentation. It functions as an OpenTelemetry trace analyzer and an LLM observability gateway, exposing system health data to large language models through the Model Context Protocol. The platform differentiates itself by combining automated root cause analysis and AI-driven diagnostics to investigate performance regressions. It also includes a cloud cost monitoring tool that attributes infrastructure spending to specifi

Pinpoint is a distributed application performance management tool designed to trace requests and monitor metrics across large-scale distributed architectures. It functions as a request tracer, topology mapper, and JVM application monitor, providing a backend capable of collecting and visualizing trace data from OpenTelemetry compatible sources. The system distinguishes itself through a combination of bytecode-based instrumentation via a Java agent and topology-based visualization that renders live maps of service interconnections. It captures execution flow across asynchronous boundaries, suc

The AWS Cloud Development Kit is an infrastructure-as-code framework that enables developers to define and provision cloud resources using familiar programming languages. By utilizing construct-based synthesis, it translates high-level, object-oriented code into declarative templates, allowing for the automated management of complex cloud environments through a centralized, code-driven control plane. The framework distinguishes itself through its ability to model infrastructure as a dependency-aware resource graph, ensuring that components are provisioned and updated in the correct order. It

DeepOps is a full-stack observability platform and application performance monitoring tool. It serves as a distributed service observability suite designed to track response times, resource usage, and service health across diverse infrastructure layers. The platform functions as a cross-stack telemetry aggregator, unifying metrics and logs into a single data stream. It incorporates a heuristic anomaly detection system that analyzes performance baselines to identify statistical outliers and predict operational failures. The system covers a broad range of monitoring capabilities, including rea

This project is a comprehensive software observability suite and application performance monitoring platform designed to track runtime errors, performance bottlenecks, and system health. It functions as a centralized diagnostic service that aggregates and categorizes exceptions, providing the infrastructure necessary to visualize complex execution paths across distributed systems and microservices. The platform distinguishes itself through a high-throughput distributed event ingestion pipeline and a columnar storage analytics engine that enables rapid aggregation of large-scale performance me

DeepFlow is an eBPF observability platform that provides a suite for continuous profiling, distributed tracing, service dependency mapping, and unified telemetry storage. It functions as a monitoring system that collects metrics, traces, and profiles without requiring manual application instrumentation or modifications to source code. The platform distinguishes itself through the use of protocol-aware packet parsing to reconstruct request chains and automated service dependency mapping to visualize interactions between applications and infrastructure. It utilizes a telemetry data store design

The OpenTelemetry Collector is a vendor-agnostic proxy and observability data pipeline that receives, processes, and exports traces, metrics, and logs. It functions as a telemetry ingestion gateway and multi-backend monitoring agent, translating various data formats into a standardized internal representation for consistent processing. The project distinguishes itself through a plugin-based component model, allowing the integration of custom receivers, processors, and exporters without modifying the core codebase. It utilizes a configurable pipeline system where telemetry flows through a sequ

This project is an OpenTelemetry reference implementation and distributed microservices environment used to demonstrate the collection and export of traces, metrics, and logs. It serves as a telemetry pipeline showcase and a polyglot instrumentation example, providing a sandbox for practicing distributed tracing and monitoring within a Kubernetes cluster. The system features a polyglot architecture to demonstrate consistent, vendor-neutral telemetry implementation across multiple programming languages. It includes a simulated environment for testing telemetry interoperability and troubleshoot

Jaeger is a distributed tracing platform used for collecting, storing, and visualizing request flows across microservices. It identifies performance bottlenecks and errors by tracking requests as they move through multiple service boundaries. The system includes telemetry collectors, a multi-tenant backend, and a trace visualizer. The platform provides a multi-tenant tracing infrastructure that isolates data and queries by tenant to support shared environments. It supports standardized telemetry ingestion via the OpenTelemetry Protocol over gRPC and HTTP. To manage storage costs and overhead,

Beats is a collection of lightweight, modular agents designed to gather, process, and forward operational telemetry from distributed infrastructure to centralized storage and analysis platforms. These agents function as a distributed data transport layer, decoupling the collection of logs, metrics, and network events from their final delivery destination. By maintaining local state and managing data flow, the system ensures reliable transmission of information across heterogeneous environments. The project distinguishes itself through a modular pipeline architecture that allows for the assemb

Anteon is a distributed load testing platform and automated performance testing suite designed to simulate high-traffic user scenarios and measure system performance across multiple global locations. It functions as an infrastructure anomaly detector and a service dependency mapper, providing a performance monitoring dashboard to track real-time resource usage across cluster instances. The project distinguishes itself by combining distributed traffic generation with service dependency mapping to identify system bottlenecks through network-level tracing. It incorporates an automated validation

Fluent Bit is a cloud-native log shipper and unified telemetry collector designed as a resource-efficient data pipeline. It ingests logs, metrics, and traces from multiple sources, processing them in real-time before routing the data to external storage backends. The project functions as a real-time stream processor and OpenTelemetry log processor, capable of transforming and filtering data using SQL and conditional logic. It also acts as a distributed tracing agent that can sample traces to reduce data volume while preserving full request paths. The system provides reliable data delivery th

Telegraf is a modular, cross-platform telemetry pipeline designed to collect, process, and route metrics from diverse infrastructure, applications, and hardware. It functions as a server-side middleware that normalizes heterogeneous data into a unified format, enabling consistent monitoring across complex environments. By utilizing a plugin-driven architecture, the agent manages the entire lifecycle of telemetry data from initial ingestion to final transmission. The project distinguishes itself through a declarative, configuration-driven execution model that allows users to define complex dat

Boto3 is the AWS SDK for Python, providing a programmatic interface for managing and automating AWS cloud infrastructure and services. It serves as a cloud management API client and resource manager for provisioning, configuring, and scaling virtual servers, databases, and storage. The library enables the implementation of infrastructure-as-code through declarative templates and scripts, allowing for the deployment of identical resource stacks across multiple accounts and geographic regions. It also provides a framework for coordinating distributed workflows, serverless functions, and contain

The OpenTelemetry .NET SDK is a set of libraries used to generate and export traces, metrics, and logs from .NET applications. It functions as an application performance monitoring tool and a distributed tracing implementation, providing the necessary infrastructure to capture system metrics and request paths across microservices. The project includes a zero-code instrumentation library that automatically captures telemetry from popular .NET frameworks without requiring manual changes to source code. It uses a provider-based API abstraction to decouple instrumentation from specific backend im

This project is a JavaScript error tracking SDK and application performance monitoring tool. It captures runtime exceptions and crashes across web browsers, server-side environments, and edge computing contexts. The SDK includes a session replay tool that records visual user interactions to reproduce bugs. To ensure telemetry delivery, it provides a tunneling proxy that routes monitoring data through custom endpoints to bypass browser-level ad blockers. The toolkit also features a source map processor that translates minified stack traces back into original source code. Additionally, it cove

OpenTelemetry Go is a framework for generating and collecting distributed traces, metrics, and logs from Go applications. It provides a standardized telemetry instrumentation API for adding observability markers to code and a corresponding SDK for processing and emitting these signals. The project utilizes a configurable observability pipeline to sample and export telemetry data to external backends using the OTLP wire protocol. It features a pluggable export system and a separation between the public API and the SDK implementation, allowing telemetry to be routed to third-party platforms wit

Kibana is a browser-based data exploration and visualization platform designed for interacting with information stored in distributed search engines. It serves as a centralized interface for analyzing structured and unstructured data, enabling users to build custom dashboards, generate interactive charts, and map complex datasets to uncover trends and actionable insights. Beyond visualization, the platform functions as a comprehensive management console for infrastructure operations. It provides tools for configuring security policies, managing data indices, and monitoring system health. The

Pyroscope is a continuous profiling platform designed to collect, store, and visualize application performance data. It functions as an application performance management suite that tracks historical resource usage to identify bottlenecks and detect performance regressions over time. The platform distinguishes itself through its use of kernel-level instrumentation and dynamic runtime hooks, which allow for performance monitoring without requiring manual code modifications or application restarts. It employs a sidecar agent architecture to offload telemetry processing, utilizing delta-encoded

This repository contains the specifications for a standardized observability data standard and telemetry instrumentation framework. It defines unified protocols for how telemetry data is instrumented, propagated, and formatted to ensure interoperability across distributed systems. The specification provides a vendor-neutral approach to observability, allowing telemetry data to be exported to various backends without locking into a single provider or requiring changes to application source code. It establishes a consistent protocol for capturing request flows across service boundaries to corre

The Datadog Agent is an infrastructure monitoring agent and host telemetry collector. It functions as a background process that gathers system metrics and application health data to send to a centralized monitoring platform. The project operates as a plugin-based metric collector, using a modular system of independent check scripts to gather data from various third-party services and applications. It serves as a remote telemetry transmitter, providing a pipeline to stream infrastructure and system information to a remote analysis and alerting backend. Its capabilities cover application perfo

Parca is an always-on continuous profiling platform that captures CPU and memory usage from running applications without any code modifications. It uses eBPF kernel-level tracing to automatically discover and sample stack traces across infrastructure, and provides a web-based flame graph dashboard for interactive performance analysis. Its label-based query engine lets users slice and aggregate profiling data across dimensions such as service, container, or region, using a Prometheus-style selector syntax. Unlike basic profilers, Parca stores profile samples in a columnar format using Apache A