At a Glance:
Uptrace is an open source APM that combines OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing, metrics, and logs with ClickHouse storage, supporting alerting, dashboards, and ingestion from multiple sources.
Overview:
Uptrace is an open-source application performance monitoring (APM) system designed to unify distributed tracing, metrics, and logs within a single interface. Built on OpenTelemetry for data collection and leveraging ClickHouse for storage along with PostgreSQL for metadata, it allows developers and operations teams to monitor application health, troubleshoot issues using an intuitive query builder, and set up alerting rules with notifications. It supports data ingestion from OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Vector, FluentBit, and CloudWatch, and offers Grafana compatibility by functioning as a Tempo or Prometheus datasource, making it suitable for users seeking an integrated observability platform.
Key Decision Points:
Deployment model: Uptrace can be run locally using Docker or accessed via a cloud demo, suggesting both self-hosted and cloud-based workflow testing.
Storage infrastructure: Requires ClickHouse for trace and metric data storage and PostgreSQL for metadata like alerts and metric names.
Monitoring unification: Combines traces, metrics, and logs in a single UI, reducing reliance on separate tools for each signal type.
Query flexibility: Offers both an SQL-like language for aggregating spans and a Promql-like language for metrics.
User and project management: Supports managing users and projects using a YAML configuration file, indicating an infrastructure-as-code approach to access control.
Core Features:
Single UI for observability signals: Provides a unified interface for browsing traces, metrics, and logs without switching tools.
Pre-built dashboards: Automatically creates 50+ dashboards once metric ingestion begins.
Query languages: Includes an SQL-like query language for span aggregation and a Promql-like language for metric aggregation.
Alerting and notifications: Monitors spans, logs, and metrics and sends alert notifications via Email, Slack, WebHook, and AlertManager.
Multi-source ingestion: Supports data collection via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Vector, FluentBit, and CloudWatch.
Grafana datasource compatibility: Can be configured as a Tempo or Prometheus datasource within Grafana.
Use Cases:
Application developers troubleshooting distributed systems by analyzing trace data alongside related metrics and logs.
Platform engineers needing to monitor infrastructure metrics and application performance using a single OpenTelemetry-native backend.
DevOps teams setting up automated alerts on spans, metrics, or logs with notifications routed to Slack, email, or AlertManager integrations.
Open-Source Alternative Value:
As an open-source APM, Uptrace enables users to run their own observability backend backed by ClickHouse and PostgreSQL, providing full access to its trace, metric, and log processing pipeline. Its OpenTelemetry-native collection, combined with ingest compatibility for Prometheus, Vector, and FluentBit, allows teams to assemble a monitoring stack without being tied to proprietary backends, while the Grafana datasource integration helps incorporate it into existing visualization workflows. The system’s efficient single-core span processing and on-disk compression can reduce operational overhead for high-volume data streams.
