Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

SigNoz VS Prometheus

Compare SigNoz VS Prometheus and see what are their differences

SigNoz logo SigNoz

Open source alternative to Datadog

Prometheus logo Prometheus

An open-source systems monitoring and alerting toolkit.
  • SigNoz Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-28

SigNoz is an open-source observability tool that helps you monitor your applications and troubleshoot problems. It provides traces, metrics, and logs under a single pane of glass.

With SigNoz, you can do the following:

  • Visualise Traces, Metrics, and Logs in a single pane of glass
  • Monitor application metrics like p99 latency, error rates for your services, external API calls, and individual endpoints.
  • Find the root cause of the problem by going to the exact traces which are causing the problem and see detailed flamegraphs of individual request traces.
  • Run aggregates on trace data to get business-relevant metrics
  • Filter and query logs, build dashboards and alerts based on attributes in logs
  • Monitor infrastructure metrics such as CPU utilization or memory usage
  • Record exceptions automatically in Python, Java, Ruby, and Javascript
  • Easy to set alerts with DIY query builder
  • Prometheus Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-13

SigNoz features and specs

  • Open Source
    SigNoz is open-source, allowing developers to have full visibility and control over the codebase. This can lead to better customizability and security as the community can audit and contribute to the project.
  • Comprehensive Observability
    SigNoz provides full-stack observability, including metrics, traces, and logs in one platform, offering a cohesive view of application performance and behavior.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The platform features an intuitive UI that makes it easier for users to visualize and analyze data, even if they are not highly experienced with observability tools.
  • Cost-Effective
    As an open-source solution, SigNoz can be more cost-effective compared to proprietary software, especially for smaller enterprises or startups.
  • Extensive Integrations
    SigNoz supports a range of integrations with popular tools and services like Kubernetes, Prometheus, and more, making it versatile for various use cases.

Possible disadvantages of SigNoz

  • Complex Setup
    The initial setup can be complex and may require a good understanding of underlying technologies such as Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Jaeger.
  • Documentation Gaps
    Some users have reported gaps or lack of depth in the documentation, which could make it challenging to troubleshoot issues or fully utilize all features.
  • Resource Intensive
    Running SigNoz can be resource-intensive, which may affect the performance of smaller or less powerful systems.
  • Community Support
    As a relatively new project, the community support around SigNoz might not be as robust as older, more established observability tools.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its comprehensive feature set, there can be a steep learning curve for new users who are not familiar with observability concepts.

Prometheus features and specs

  • Powerful Query Language
    Prometheus uses PromQL, a flexible and powerful query language that allows for complex and detailed queries.
  • Dimensional Data Model
    Prometheus employs a multidimensional data model with time series data identified by metric name and key-value pairs, offering great flexibility in data organization.
  • Auto-Discovery
    It supports service discovery mechanisms to automatically locate and scrape metrics from jobs, simplifying the monitoring process.
  • Alerting
    Prometheus includes built-in alerting capabilities that allow you to trigger alerts based on PromQL queries, which can be integrated with different alert management systems.
  • Scalability
    Its architecture, which uses independent single servers, scales well, allowing you to handle a large number of time series efficiently.
  • Open Source
    Prometheus is open-source and supported by a large community, offering transparency, regular updates, and numerous integrations.
  • Easy Integration
    Thanks to its compatibility with various data exporting standards and a myriad of existing exporters, integrating Prometheus into existing systems is streamlined.

Possible disadvantages of Prometheus

  • Single Points of Failure
    Prometheus instances operate independently, meaning that if a server goes down, the metrics it monitored will be unavailable unless replicated manually.
  • Storage Overhead
    Prometheus can consume significant storage, especially for high-resolution time series data, which might necessitate careful planning and management.
  • Limited Long-Term Storage
    By default, Prometheus is not designed for long-term storage of metrics and may require integration with other systems like Thanos or Cortex for this purpose.
  • Complexity for Beginners
    The sheer number of features and the complexities associated with PromQL can present a steep learning curve for newcomers.
  • Scaling Write Operations
    In high-scale environments, write operations might become a bottleneck due to the single-server nature of the Prometheus architecture.
  • Lack of Native High Availability
    While Prometheus supports running multiple instances, it does not provide built-in high availability features out-of-the-box, necessitating additional configurations.
  • No Built-in Authentication and Authorization
    Prometheus lacks native support for secure authentication and authorization, which means these features must be externally managed.

SigNoz videos

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Prometheus videos

How Prometheus Monitoring works | Prometheus Architecture explained

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to SigNoz and Prometheus)
Monitoring Tools
16 16%
84% 84
Open Source
100 100%
0% 0
Log Management
15 15%
85% 85
Performance Monitoring
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare SigNoz and Prometheus

SigNoz Reviews

Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
SigNoz can be a great Grafana alternative. SigNoz is also open-source, just like Grafana. So, if you want to self-host SigNoz, clone the GitHub repo to get started.
Source: signoz.io

Prometheus Reviews

The 10 Best Nagios Alternatives in 2024 (Paid and Open-source)
The 10 Best Prometheus Alternatives 2024 Prometheus is one of the most well-known open-source monitoring tools out there. But is it right for you? Check out these Prometheus alternatives to find out.
Source: betterstack.com
Top 11 Grafana Alternatives & Competitors [2024]
Under the hood, Grafana is powered by multiple tools like Loki, Tempo, Mimir & Prometheus. SigNoz is built as a single tool to serve logs, metrics, and traces in a single pane of glass. SigNoz uses a single datastore - ClickHouse to power its observability stack. This makes SigNoz much better in correlating signals and driving better insights.
Source: signoz.io
GCP Managed Service For Prometheus vs. Levitate | Last9
Levitate is up to 30X cost-efficient compared with Google Managed Prometheus. This is possible because of warehousing capabilities such as data tiering, streaming aggregations, and cardinality controls, making it a much superior choice to Google Managed Prometheus.
Source: last9.io
The Best Open Source Network Monitoring Tools in 2023
Description: Prometheus is an open source monitoring solution focused on data collection and analysis. It allows users to set up network monitoring capabilities using the native toolset. The tool is able to collect information on devices using SNMP pings and examine network bandwidth usage from the device perspective, among other functinos. The PromQL system analyzes data...
10 Best Linux Monitoring Tools and Software to Improve Server Performance [2022 Comparison]
Prometheus and Grafana are used together as an open-source monitoring and alerting solution with support for Linux servers. Prometheus mainly collects the Linux hardware and OS metrics exposed by *nix kernel and then stores as time-series data, using a pull model over HTTP. You can find metrics information in a multi-dimensional data model of the timestamped metrics (i.e.,...
Source: sematext.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Prometheus should be more popular than SigNoz. It has been mentiond 275 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

SigNoz mentions (93)

  • Telescope – an open-source web-based log viewer for logs stored in ClickHouse
    Telescope is primarily focused on log visualization, not on log collection or preparing ClickHouse for storage. The system does not currently provide (and I think will not ever) built-in mechanisms for parsing or ingesting logs from different sources (e.g., text files or journald). I will consider providing a how-to guideon setting up log storage in ClickHouse, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to cover all... - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Use BetterStack to Replace PagerDuty, Datadog, and Statuspage–Cut Costs by 90%
    Was just looking at https://signoz.io/ to replace DD. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • I got OpenTelemetry to work. But why was it so complicated?
    A lot of web frameworks etc do most of the instrumentation for you these days. For instance using opentelemetry-js and self hosting something like https://signoz.io should take less than an hour to get spun up and you get a ton of data without writing any custom code. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Ask HN: Hosting on Digital Ocean, any advice for monitoring and deployments?
    If your app is instrumented with OpenTelemetry, I'd really recommend something like SigNoz (https://signoz.io/) (or even Baselime.io but their application is a mess to work with) 1. Axiom has a generous free plan (not sure if it's self-hostable). - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • 14 Monitoring Tools for Full-Stack Developers
    SigNoz positions itself as an "open-source DataDog alternative". You can host it yourself or use the commercial cloud version. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
View more

Prometheus mentions (275)

  • Deploying Prometheus on a Raspberry Pi Cluster
    Deploying Prometheus on a Raspberry Pi cluster is a great way to monitor your Raspberry Pis and gather insightful metrics from them. In this guide, we'll walk through the steps to set up Prometheus with one master node (Pi) and three worker nodes (Pis). - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Kubernetes Observability With Kube-State-Metrics
    You must use Prometheus to collect and query Kube-State-Metrics output. The steps to correctly configure Prometheus to scrape Kube-State-Metrics may vary depending on how you installed Prometheus in your cluster. - Source: dev.to / 7 days ago
  • Working with OpenTelemetry Metrics
    In this setup, we are launching the OpenTelemetry Collector with the configuration file otel-collector-config.yaml and exposing its gRPC and HTTP receiver ports on localhost. Also, we are launching Prometheus with the configuration file prometheus.yaml and exposing its UI on localhost. - Source: dev.to / 13 days ago
  • 10 Best Cloud Monitoring Tools for 2025
    Prometheus is an open-source monitoring solution designed for time-series data, commonly used with Grafana for visualization. This combination is popular among organizations seeking customizable and scalable monitoring solutions, especially in Kubernetes environments. - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
  • Monitoring API Requests and Responses for System Health
    Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools that offer maximum flexibility without ongoing licensing costs—ideal for teams willing to manage their own infrastructure and configuration. - Source: dev.to / 20 days ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing SigNoz and Prometheus, you can also consider the following products

Open Telemetry - An observability framework for cloud-native software.

Grafana - Data visualization & Monitoring with support for Graphite, InfluxDB, Prometheus, Elasticsearch and many more databases

Datadog - See metrics from all of your apps, tools & services in one place with Datadog's cloud monitoring as a service solution. Try it for free.

NewRelic - New Relic is a Software Analytics company that makes sense of billions of metrics across millions of apps. We help the people who build modern software understand the stories their data is trying to tell them.

Zabbix - Track, record, alert and visualize performance and availability of IT resources

Nagios - Complete monitoring and alerting for servers, switches, applications, and services

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