Overview:
Uptrace is an open-source Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool that unifies distributed tracing, metrics, and logs into a single interface. It helps developers and operations teams monitor application performance and troubleshoot issues by providing a query builder, pre-built dashboards, and alerting rules. Designed for high-volume data, Uptrace can process billions of spans and metrics on a single server. It uses OpenTelemetry for data collection and ClickHouse for data storage, with PostgreSQL for metadata.
Core Features:
Unified UI for traces, metrics, and logs: Provides a single interface to view and correlate telemetry data.
Pre-built dashboards: Automatically creates 50+ dashboards based on incoming metrics.
Multi-channel alerting: Supports alerts via Email, Slack, WebHook, and AlertManager for spans, logs, and metrics.
SQL-like and PromQL-like query languages: Enables aggregation of spans and metrics respectively.
OpenTelemetry-native data ingestion: Collects data via OpenTelemetry, as well as Prometheus, Vector, FluentBit, and CloudWatch.
Grafana compatibility: Can be configured as a Tempo or Prometheus datasource in Grafana.
Use Cases:
Monitoring application performance with high throughput: Teams can process over 10,000 spans per second per core and compress trace data efficiently (e.g., 1KB to ~40 bytes).
Troubleshooting production incidents: Using faceted filters and service graphs within a single UI to correlate traces, metrics, and logs.
Setting up automated monitoring: Creating custom alerts based on aggregated span and metric data with notification routing.
Managing multi-project observability: Handling users and projects via YAML configuration with single sign-on (SSO) through OpenID Connect providers like Keycloak, Google Cloud, and Cloudflare.
Why It Matters:
Uptime provides a self-hosted, single-pane-of-glass approach to APM that avoids the complexity of managing separate tools for traces, metrics, and logs. Its use of OpenTelemetry for ingestion and ClickHouse for storage makes it designed for efficiency at scale, with high compression ratios reducing storage costs. The inclusion of pre-built dashboards, Grafana compatibility, and SSO support makes it a practical and developer-friendly alternative for organizations that want full control over their monitoring stack.
