⚖️ Why SigNoz Instead of Grafana or ELK?
When setting up observability, most teams consider three options: SigNoz, Grafana Stack, or ELK Stack. Here's why SigNoz was chosen for this project and when each makes sense.
🔍 Side-by-Side Comparison
| Feature | SigNoz | Grafana Stack | ELK Stack |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traces | ✅ Built-in | ✅ (Tempo — extra setup) | ❌ Not native |
| Metrics | ✅ Built-in | ✅ (Prometheus — extra setup) | ⚠️ Limited |
| Logs | ✅ Built-in | ✅ (Loki — extra setup) | ✅ Primary strength |
| Single tool | ✅ Yes | ❌ 3 separate tools | ❌ Log-focused |
| Setup complexity | 🟢 Low | 🟡 Medium–High | 🔴 High |
| Resource usage | 🟡 Medium | 🟡 Medium | 🔴 Heavy |
| OpenTelemetry native | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Partially | ❌ No |
| Open-source | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
📦 Grafana Stack — What You'd Need
To get the same features as SigNoz, you'd install and configure:
- Prometheus — for metrics collection
- Loki — for log aggregation
- Tempo — for distributed tracing
- Grafana — the dashboard UI that ties it all together
Each of those has its own config files, storage, ports, and maintenance. It's powerful, but for a small-to-medium team it's a lot of moving parts.
📦 ELK Stack — What You'd Need
ELK = Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana
- Great for logs only
- Elasticsearch is very RAM-hungry (2–4 GB minimum recommended)
- Scaling it is complex
- Not designed for traces or metrics out of the box
💡 In this VM, Elasticsearch and Kibana are already running for other purposes. Adding them again for SigNoz's observability would duplicate resources. SigNoz uses ClickHouse instead — much lighter for telemetry data.
✅ Why SigNoz Was Chosen
- One tool = one install, one dashboard, one learning curve
- OpenTelemetry native = industry-standard instrumentation, no vendor lock-in
- ClickHouse backend = fast columnar storage optimized for telemetry queries
- Self-hosted = data stays on your VM, no external billing
- Simpler ops = for a team already managing many services, fewer tools to monitor
🤔 When to Choose Something Else
| Situation | Better Choice |
|---|---|
| You already have a mature Grafana setup | Stick with Grafana |
| Your team only needs log searching | ELK is excellent for that |
| You want zero ops overhead | SigNoz Cloud or Datadog |
| Kubernetes + advanced dashboards | Grafana + Prometheus is more mature |
Official Documentation Links
- SigNoz docs home
- SigNoz metrics docs
- SigNoz tracing docs
- OpenTelemetry docs home
- OpenTelemetry collector docs
- OpenTelemetry semantic conventions
Read in Sequence
- Previous: 1-introduction.md
- Next: 3-theory-prerequisites.md