Self-host SigNoz
OpenTelemetry-native APM, logs, metrics, and traces in a single application, backed by ClickHouse for unified storage and querying.
Key facts
Pick SigNoz when you want one OpenTelemetry-native app for metrics, logs, and traces instead of stitching together separate tools — it's the closest thing here to a self-hosted Datadog. Budget a real box: ClickHouse wants 4 GB of RAM before it's comfortable. If you only need metrics dashboards, Grafana plus Prometheus is far less to run.
What you need
- Any VPS with at least 4096 MB of RAM
- A domain you control — most self-hosted setups need HTTPS in front of them
- About the better part of a day
Install
Run these commands on your server:
# SigNoz — installs via Foundry; the old deploy/docker compose files are
# deprecated as of v0.130.0 and no longer distributed.
curl -fsSL https://signoz.io/foundry.sh | bash
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH" # foundryctl installs here
cat > casting.yaml <<'YAML'
apiVersion: v1alpha1
kind: Installation
metadata:
name: signoz
spec:
deployment:
flavor: compose
mode: docker
YAML
foundryctl cast -f casting.yaml # → http://SERVER_IP:8080What you take on
SigNoz asks for a genuine server and gives you an open-core product in return, so weigh both before committing:
An alternative to
Head-to-head
Same job, opposite ownership: run the ClickHouse stack yourself, or pay per host forever.
One integrated OTel app vs. the dashboard layer you build a stack around.
OTel-native APM platform vs. a featherweight single binary.
More in Observability
Grafana
Graylog
Netdata
OpenObserve
Common questions
How much RAM does SigNoz need?
4 GB minimum, and that is a real floor, not a marketing one — ClickHouse is doing the storage and querying underneath, and it wants that memory before it's comfortable. Budget closer to 8 GB if you want headroom for real trace and log retention rather than a bare-minimum demo.
SigNoz vs Grafana?
They answer different questions. SigNoz is a single OpenTelemetry-native app that collects and stores metrics, logs, and traces itself, backed by ClickHouse. Grafana is a dashboarding and alerting layer that queries a data source you run separately — Prometheus, Loki, or ClickHouse among others — so it isn't a drop-in alternative unless you're also willing to run and size that backend yourself.
Can SigNoz replace Datadog?
For the core APM workload — metrics, logs, and traces correlated in one UI — yes, that's the explicit goal. What you give up is Datadog's 800+ managed integrations and the elastic ingest that never asks you to size a database; you take on sizing and operating ClickHouse yourself. See our Datadog alternatives roundup for how it compares to the other self-hosted options.