Uptrace: application performance monitoring
Uptrace is an open source APM tool that supports distributed tracing, metrics, and logs. You can use it to monitor applications and set up automatic alerts to receive notifications via email, Slack, Telegram, and more.
Uptrace uses OpenTelelemetry to collect data and ClickHouse database to store it. ClickHouse is the only dependency.
Open source APM
Uptrace is a source available APM tool that supports OpenTelemetry tracing, OpenTelemetry metrics, and logs. You can use it to monitor applications and set up alerts to receive notifications via email, Slack, Telegram, and more.
Uptrace provides tools and enables techniques to measure and analyze the performance of an application, identify areas of inefficiency or potential issues, and make improvements to optimize performance.
In just 5 minutes, you can start using Uptrace to monitor Go, Python, JavaScript, Ruby, Java, Rust, Erlang, Elixir, and PHP applications.
Screenshots
Uptrace allows to monitor your whole application stack on a compact and informative dashboard. You get a quick overview for all your services, hosts, and systems.
You can also analyze application performance using a fast and intuitive query language. You have the full power of SQL at your disposal to get deep insights from your data.
What is OpenTelemetry?
Uptrace uses OpenTelemetry to instrument code and collect traces, metrics, and logs. OpenTelemetry specifies how to collect and export telemetry data. With OpenTelemetry, you can instrument your application once and then add or change vendors without changing the instrumentation.
OpenTelemetry is available for most programming languages and provides interoperability across different languages and environments.
How Uptrace works?
Uptrace uses OpenTelemetry protocol to receive telemetry data directly from your application or from OpenTelemetry Collector.
Uptrace efficiently stores the data in ClickHouse database which, when compared with Elasticsearch or Cassandra, allows to significantly reduce storage requirements and improve query performance.
Uptrace uses AlertManager to create alerts and send notifications via email, Slack, Telegram, and more.
Uptrace comes with a modern Vue-based UI that helps you analyze and optimize application performance using a fast and intuitive query language.
APM basics
- Application performance management (APM) is the practice of monitoring software applications. It includes performance and availability monitoring, alerting, root cause analysis, and more.
- Span is an operation (unit of work) in a trace, for example, an HTTP endpoint or a database query.
- Trace is a tree of spans that shows the path that a request makes through an app. Root span is the first span in a trace.
- You create spans with a tracer. Usually, there is a single tracer for an app or a library.
- Event is like a span without duration, for example, a read message event or an error event. You can also think of events as spans without end time (and thus duration).
- Attribute is a key-value pair on a span that carries some information about the operation. For example,
host.name: localhostorhttp.request_content_length: 10000. - OpenTelemetry is a vendor-neutral API for distributed traces and metrics. Uptrace uses OpenTelemetry to collect telemetry data.
- Uptrace client is an OpenTelemery distribution configured to export data to Uptrace.
Why Uptrace?
- Single binary with ClickHouse being the only dependency.
- Single UI for traces, metrics, and logs.
- Efficient ingestion: more than 10K spans / second on a single core.
- Excellent on-disk compression. For example, using ZSTD, 1KB span can be compressed down to <40 bytes.
- S3-like storage support with ability to automatically upload cold data to S3-like storage or HDD.
- Alerting with notifications via email, Slack, Telegram, and more.
- Pre-configured OpenTelemetry SDKs for popular programming languages.
Why not ...?
Also see Open source distributed tracing tools for broader comparison.
Signoz
- Both projects use Go, OpenTelemetry, and ClickHouse.
- Both projects support all 3 major observability signals: traces, metrics, and logs.
- Uptrace uses the BSL license. Signoz uses dual licensing: Apache 2.0 and Enterprise License.
- Both projects use AlertManager for sending notifications.
- Uptrace provides spans grouping and optimizes ClickHouse schema for filtering and analyzing similar spans. Signoz uses more service-oriented schema design.
- Uptrace provides pre-configured OpenTelemetry distros, but Signoz provides instructions how to configure OpenTelemetry SDK.
The main difference between projects is in the user interface which has too many differences to be described accurately.
SkyWalking
SkyWalking does not support ClickHouse and instead uses ElasticSearch/OpenSearch, which is less efficient for storing telemetry. SkyWalking also does not directly support OpenTelemetry protocol and provides OpenTelemetry adapters instead.
SkyWalking has an official demo (skywalking:skywalking) so you can easily compare it with Uptrace demo yourself.
Jaeger
Jaeger requires a plugin to work with ClickHouse. Because Jaeger supports multiple storages, the ClickHouse database schema and the plugin communication protocol can be considered sub-optimal.
Jaeger does not support metrics, charts, percentiles, and has limited filtering capabilities.
Zipkin
Zipkin does not support ClickHouse and requires OpenTelemetry -> Zipkin transformation to convert data between different protocols.
Zipkin's UI is minimalistic and can't be directly compared with Uptrace.
Open Source
All Uptrace code code is open and battle-tested in production by thousands of happy users:
What's next?
Next, get started with Uptrace by downloading the Uptrace binary or creating a cloud account.
