Deploy SigNoz on Ubuntu for full-stack application observability: distributed tracing, metrics, and logs in a single self-hosted platform.
4 GB RAM for a stable setup (8 GB recommended for production).Grab the automated bash script from GitHub to follow along with the video.
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mhmdali94/Docker/main/monitoring/signoz/signoz-ubuntu.sh
chmod +x signoz-ubuntu.sh
sudo bash signoz-ubuntu.shwget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mhmdali94/Docker/main/monitoring/signoz/signoz-ubuntu.shchmod +x signoz-ubuntu.shThe script installs Docker if needed, then deploys SigNoz with ClickHouse and all backend services automatically.
sudo bash signoz-ubuntu.shOpen your browser and navigate to:
http://<your-server-ip>:3301Add an OpenTelemetry SDK to your app and point it to the SigNoz collector to start sending traces and metrics.
| Port | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 3301 | SigNoz Web UI |
| 4317 | OTLP gRPC (OpenTelemetry — internal) |
| 4318 | OTLP HTTP (OpenTelemetry — internal) |
SigNoz is an open-source DataDog alternative that provides distributed tracing, metrics, and log management in a single platform. Built on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse, it gives you correlated views across all three pillars of observability without vendor lock-in. Ideal for engineering teams who want APM-grade visibility over their applications.
SigNoz replaces paid APM tools like DataDog or New Relic with a self-hosted, open-source platform that costs a fraction of the price. By using OpenTelemetry as the instrumentation standard, you avoid SDK lock-in and can switch backends freely. The correlated traces-metrics-logs view makes debugging production issues dramatically faster.
SigNoz frontend listens on port 3301. OTLP gRPC is on 4317 and OTLP HTTP on 4318 — keep both internal-only for your instrumented apps. Open 3301 to your local network; expose externally only behind Nginx with SSL.
Jaeger (traces only, no metrics/logs), Tempo + Grafana (traces without the APM layer), OpenObserve (lighter, no dedicated APM view), Elastic APM (heavier, requires Elasticsearch). SigNoz is the best open-source DataDog-equivalent for teams that want one unified platform.
If you have a simple monolith with no distributed tracing needs, Grafana + Prometheus is simpler and lighter. SigNoz adds value at the microservices layer — if you have one service, the overhead isn't worth it.
PrismaTechWork provides end-to-end infrastructure services — from initial deployment and security hardening to ongoing monitoring, automated backups, and dedicated support. Whether you need a single-server setup or a multi-site network, our team ensures your infrastructure is built right, secured properly, and maintained reliably.
Yes, you need to add an OpenTelemetry SDK to your application and configure it to export to SigNoz's collector. The SDK is available for all major languages (Python, Node.js, Java, Go, .NET). For some frameworks, auto-instrumentation handles most of the work with zero code changes.
The community edition is fully open-source and free. SigNoz offers a paid cloud version and an enterprise plan with SSO and additional features. For self-hosted use, there are no licensing costs — just your infrastructure.
ClickHouse scales very well — production deployments handle billions of trace spans per day on reasonable hardware. For a small team (under 10 services), a 4-core, 8 GB RAM server is sufficient. Set retention policies to control disk usage.
It can handle metrics and basic dashboards, but Grafana's ecosystem of plugins, data sources, and panel types is far richer. Many teams use both: SigNoz for APM and tracing, Grafana for infrastructure metrics and custom dashboards.
Yes, SigNoz has a Logs tab with full-text search. You can ship logs via the OpenTelemetry Collector using filelog or fluentforward receivers, or send structured logs directly from your application's OTel SDK.
OpenTelemetry (OTel) is a CNCF standard for instrumenting applications to produce traces, metrics, and logs. SigNoz uses it as the instrumentation layer to avoid vendor lock-in — you can switch to any OTel-compatible backend (Jaeger, Tempo, Zipkin) later without changing your application code.
In the SigNoz UI, go to Alerts → New Alert. You can create metric-based, trace-based, or log-based alerts using PromQL-like queries. Notifications can be sent to Slack, PagerDuty, OpsGenie, or any webhook endpoint.
Run `docker compose pull && docker compose up -d` in your SigNoz directory. Check the SigNoz release notes on GitHub before updating — ClickHouse schema migrations may run automatically on startup.