Overview
OpenObserve is an open-source, cloud-native observability platform that unifies logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring into a single system — at a fraction of the cost of commercial alternatives. Built in Rust and powered by Apache Parquet columnar storage, it delivers petabyte-scale query performance that would take traditional tools like Elasticsearch or Splunk orders of magnitude more infrastructure to match.
The core promise is lower storage cost than Elasticsearch plus strong large-scale query performance: OpenObserve cites up to 140x lower storage cost and an internal benchmark of querying 1PB in 2 seconds. OpenObserve achieves this through a 40x compression ratio using Parquet files, a stateless architecture that scales horizontally, and support for familiar query languages — SQL for logs and traces, PromQL for metrics — so your team doesn't have to learn proprietary syntax.
With 18,000+ GitHub stars and 6,000+ companies relying on it, OpenObserve has become a serious contender for teams looking to cut observability costs without sacrificing capability.
Key Features
Unified Logs, Metrics & Traces — Ingest and correlate all three observability pillars in one platform. No stitching together separate tools for each signal type, and no proprietary query language — making it a natural fit alongside AI data analysis workflows.
Frontend Monitoring (RUM) — Real User Monitoring with session replay, error tracking, and performance metrics. Understand actual user experience in production, not just infrastructure health.
Data Pipelines — Real-time and scheduled data pipelines for transforming, filtering, enriching, or routing telemetry before it hits storage. Reduce noise and storage costs at ingestion time.
Alerts & Dashboards — Continuous monitoring with multi-window alert conditions and a drag-and-drop dashboard builder. Supports multiple notification channels (Slack, PagerDuty, email, webhooks).
OpenTelemetry Native — Full compatibility with the OTel ecosystem. Ingest from Filebeat, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector, Kafka, and 30+ other collectors without reconfiguring your pipeline.
Flexible Storage Backends — Works with local disk, Amazon S3, MinIO, Google Cloud Storage, and Azure Blob. Bring your own storage and control your data residency.
Single Binary to Kubernetes — Start with a single binary on a laptop; scale to a multi-node HA cluster on Kubernetes without changing data formats or reconfiguring clients.
How It Compares
| OpenObserve | Datadog | Elasticsearch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing model | $0.50/GB ingested | Product-specific pricing varies by Datadog SKU | Elastic pricing varies by deployment, ingest, and retention |
| Query language | SQL + PromQL | DQL (proprietary) | Lucene / KQL |
| Deployment | Single binary or K8s | SaaS only | Complex cluster setup |
| Open source | ✅ AGPL-3.0 | ❌ | ✅ AGPLv3 source code (Elastic distributions also use ELv2/SSPL options) |
| Frontend monitoring | ✅ Built-in RUM | ✅ Datadog RUM | ✅ Elastic RUM / User Experience monitoring |
| Self-hosted option | ✅ Free | ❌ | ✅ |
Compared with Datadog's host-based infrastructure pricing and separate product meters, OpenObserve centers its cloud billing on usage-based ingest and query charges. Compared to Elasticsearch, the Parquet-based storage architecture delivers dramatically lower storage footprint with no index management overhead.
Pricing & Plans
OpenObserve offers two paths: self-hosted for free (open-source) or managed cloud with usage-based pricing.
Self-Hosted (Free)
- Core open-source observability features under AGPL-3.0
- No vendor-imposed seat caps; practical scale depends on your infrastructure
- Enterprise-only capabilities such as SSO, RBAC, audit trail, extended retention, and federated search are not included in OSS
- Community support via GitHub and the OpenObserve community Slack
- You manage your own infrastructure
Cloud — Pay As You Go
| Resource | Price |
|---|---|
| Data ingestion | $0.50 / GB |
| Query | $0.01 / GB queried |
| Pipeline processing | $0.20 / GB |
| Extra retention (beyond 15 days) | $0.10 / 30 days |
| AI Credits | $0.50 / credit (20 free) |
- Unlimited users with Role-Based Access Control
- 14-day free trial
- No per-seat fees
Enterprise
- Custom pricing with volume discounts
- Premium support with SLAs
- Architecture reviews
- Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) deployment option
Community & Ecosystem
OpenObserve is one of the fastest-growing open-source observability projects, having crossed 15,000 GitHub stars since its launch. With over 3,600 active deployments across home labs, startups, and Fortune 500 enterprises, the project reflects genuine adoption rather than hype.
As AI agents increasingly run in production environments, OpenObserve's unified telemetry makes it straightforward to monitor agent latency, error rates, and resource usage alongside traditional infrastructure.
Integrations supported:
- Log collectors: Filebeat, Fluent Bit, Fluentd, Vector
- Message brokers: Kafka, RabbitMQ, NATS
- Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Snowflake
- Cloud: AWS, Azure, GCP
- DevOps: Kubernetes, Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Terraform
- Standards: OpenTelemetry (Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, TypeScript SDKs)
The AGPL-3.0 license ensures the codebase remains open. Enterprise teams that need vendor-supported deployment or custom SLAs can engage through the Enterprise plan.
Best For
- DevOps and SRE teams at cost-conscious startups replacing Datadog or Splunk
- Platform engineers who need a self-hosted observability stack with no per-seat costs
- Security teams using log aggregation for SIEM-style analysis alongside AI data science tooling
- Companies with high log volumes where Elasticsearch storage costs are unsustainable
- Open-source teams and developers who want full data ownership and no vendor lock-in
FAQ
Is OpenObserve really free for self-hosted deployments?
Yes. The self-hosted OSS version is available under AGPL-3.0, but it does not include Enterprise/Cloud-only capabilities such as SSO, RBAC, audit trail, extended retention, and federated search. Anonymous telemetry is enabled by default and can be disabled. You manage your own infrastructure and storage.
How does OpenObserve achieve 140x lower storage costs than Elasticsearch?
OpenObserve stores data as Apache Parquet files with columnar compression, achieving roughly a 40x compression ratio over raw log data. Unlike Elasticsearch, which maintains inverted indexes that can consume 3-10x the original data size, Parquet files are compact and directly queryable without index overhead.
Do I need to learn a new query language?
No. OpenObserve uses SQL for querying logs and traces, and PromQL for metrics — the same languages your team likely already uses. There is no proprietary query syntax to learn.
What is the 14-day free trial for?
The trial applies to the managed cloud offering. It gives you full access to the Pay As You Go plan without a credit card for 14 days, letting you evaluate ingestion, dashboards, and alerting before committing.
Can I start self-hosted and move to cloud later?
Yes. OpenObserve keeps its core ingestion model and workflows broadly consistent across self-hosted and cloud deployments, but migration details should still be validated for your storage, dashboards, and operating model. You can start with a single binary locally, scale to a multi-node Kubernetes cluster, or migrate to the managed cloud without changing your log shippers or dashboards.
What's the difference between self-hosted and BYOC (Enterprise)?
Self-hosted means you deploy and manage OpenObserve on your own infrastructure. BYOC (Bring Your Own Cloud) under the Enterprise plan means OpenObserve manages the software stack on your cloud account, providing the operational simplicity of managed cloud while keeping your data within your own cloud environment.
Does OpenObserve support OpenTelemetry?
Yes. OpenObserve is fully OpenTelemetry-compatible for logs, metrics, and traces. It accepts data from OTel collectors in all major languages (Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, TypeScript) and works alongside existing collectors like Fluent Bit, Filebeat, and Vector. It accepts data from OTel collectors in all major languages (Python, Node.js, Go, Rust, TypeScript) and works alongside existing collectors like Fluent Bit, Filebeat, and Vector.
Is OpenObserve SOC 2 certified?
Yes. OpenObserve's cloud offering has achieved SOC 2 Type II certification. For HIPAA or other compliance requirements under the Enterprise plan, contact the sales team directly.
