openobserve VS evidence

Lot of interesting OSS observability products coming out in recent years. One of the more impressive(and curious for many reasons) IMHO is OpenObserve: https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve .

As opposed to just a stack, they are implementing just about the whole backend shebang from scratch.

in case it matters to others, https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/tree/v0.7.0 is the last Apache2 licensed copy before they went AGPL with 0.7.1

https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve/blob/v0.7.0/.env.... is some "onoz" for me, but just recently someone submitted https://github.com/aenix-io/etcd-operator to the CNCF sandbox so maybe things have gotten better around keeping that PoS alive

eCharts is awesome. We moved from plotly after using it for several months to echarts at https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve and are super happy.

Wouldn't make more sense to have the same observability stack on production and development? For instance, open-observe is also a single binary that provides UI for logs, metrics and traces, although every log producer would have to be properly configured and routing to it.

Another idea: maybe chrome dev-tools could be repurposed to display server logs instead of client logs, somehow [2].

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1: https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve

2: https://chromedevtools.github.io/devtools-protocol/

It doesn't read from files unfortunately, but https://openobserve.ai/ is very easy to set up locally (single binary) and send otel logs/metrics/traces to.

Here's how I run it locally for my little shovel project - https://github.com/bbkane/shovel#run-the-webapp-locally-with... .

Also linked from that README is an Ansible playbook to start OpenObserve as a systems service on a Linux VM.

Alternatively, see the shovel codebase I linked above for a "stdout" TracerProvider. You could do something like that to save to a file, and then use a tool to prettify the JSON. I have a small script to format json logs at https://github.com/bbkane/dotfiles/blob/2df9af5a9bbb40f2e101...

Implement a monitoring stack, or openobserve for an all-in-one package.

I would recommend you take a look at OpenObserve (https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve ). It's free and open source and can do all you asked and more with far lower resource utilization. It's the easiest to run of any log system that you can find. Can capture windows and linux logs. Also compresses them heavily (30-60x, YMMV). 100 GB ingested logs can be 3 GB stored.

I have used https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve in several hobby projects and liked it. It's an all-in-one solution. It's likely less featureful than many others but a single binary and everything in one place pulled me in and worked for me so far.

Not affiliated, I just like the tool.

A good one. A lot is being built on top of clickhouse. I can count at least 3 if not more (hyperdx, signoz and highlight) built on top of clickhouse now.

We at OpenObserve are solving the same problem but a bit differently. A much simpler solution that anyone can run using a single binary on their own laptop or in a cluster of hundreds of nodes backed by s3. Covers logs, metrics, traces, Session replay, RUM and error tracking are being released by end of the month) - https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve

We use echarts at https://evidence.dev and have been quite happy with it. We do a lot of embedded analytics and it's worked well for us.

It’s interesting to me how far you have pushed the SQL language in this framework, such that it truly is “SQL only”.

The challenge as I see it with enabling analysts to build websites is that you need to build abstractions to get from familiar (SQL, yaml) - the language of analytics, to new (HTML, CSS, JS) - the language of the web browser

As one of the maintainers of Evidence (https://evidence.dev), one of the things I’ve often considered is how accessible our syntax is to analysts. Our syntax combines SQL and Markdown, with MDX style components e.g.

The are inherently webdev-ey, and I do think they put off potential users.

On the flip-side, by adhering to web standards, you get extensibility out of the box, and working out what to do is just a Google search away.

Anyway, thanks for the thought provoking piece.

Dataclips was my first experiences writing SQL.

Writing code was a markedly better DX that building dashboards in Tableau, which is why I'm now working on https://evidence.dev - a SSG for creating data from SQL and markdown

Previous HN discussions:

I'm one of the founders of Evidence (https://evidence.dev) - would be great to hear about your experience. Reaching out now!

Full fledged BI tools like Superset and Metabase are amazing for their intended use cases.

But they may be an overkill if your primary use case is to infrequently build semi-interactive reports for non-technical end-users and your use cases are are mostly covered by standard graphs & tables. Esp. so if you are familiar with SQL and have access to the underlying data source. Two nifty utilities I have found to be very useful for latter kind of use cases are SQLPage and Evidence.

They make it very convenient to whip out some SQL and convert that to a neat professional looking web ui that can be forwarded to an end user. In case of Evidence it is a statically generated site, and in case of SQLPage it is a web app that connects to a live database.

SQLPage: https://sql.ophir.dev/

Evidence: https://evidence.dev

We used ECharts to build our charting library at Evidence and it’s been a great experience overall (https://evidence.dev).

We started with D3 and a few other tools, but felt that we get a lot more out of the box with ECharts, like interactivity and an events API. ECharts is also a lot more extensible than people give it credit for.

If anyone is curious, we documented the process of selecting a charting library after assessing several options: https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence/issues/136

The new direction seems very similar to what evidence has been doing for a while

https://evidence.dev

I'm quite excited about this, and would also love to have it distributed as an NPM package.

I work on an OSS web framework for reporting/ decision support applications (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence), and we use WASM duckDB as our query engine. Several folks have asked for PRQL support, and this looks like it could be a pretty seamless way to add it.

> Not sure the language you choose matters as much as making the API usable by a wide audience.

Fully agree with this, and having typeset my masters thesis and later my resume using LaTeX, I think that the “authoring experience” is 100% the place to focus on improving.

If you’re interested in the “markup to document publishing” space, you might also be interested in the open-source report publishing tool I’m now working on, Evidence (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence)

It’s similarly based on markdown, though uses code fences to execute code, HTML style tags for charts and components, and {…} for JavaScript, i.e.

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