quickwit VS highlight

Hi folks, Quickwit cofounder here.

We started Quickwit 3 years ago with a POC, "Searching the web for under $1000/month" (see HN discussions [0]), with the goal of making a robust OSS alternative to Elasticsearch / Splunk / Datadog.

We have reached a significant milestone with our latest release (0.7) [1], as we have witnessed users of the nightly version of Quickwit deploy clusters with hundreds of nodes, ingest hundreds of terabytes of data daily, and enjoy considerable cost savings.

To give you a concrete example, one company is ingesting hundreds of terabytes of logs daily and migrating from Elasticsearch to Quickwit. They divided their compute costs by 5x and storage costs by 2x while increasing retention from 3 to 30 days. They also increased their durability, accuracy with exactly-once semantics thanks to the native Kafka support, and elasticity.

The 0.7 release also brings better integrations with the Observability ecosystem: improvements of the Elasticsearch-compatible API and better support of OpenTelemetry standards, Grafana, and Jaeger.

Of course, we still have a lot of work to be a fully-fledged observability engine, and we would love to get some feedback or suggestions.

To give you a glance at our 2024 roadmap, we planned to focus on Kibana/OpenDashboard integration, metrics support, and pipe-based query language.

[0] Searching the web for under $1000/month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481

[1] Release blog post: https://quickwit.io/blog/quickwit-0.7

[2] Open Source Repo: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

[3] Home Page: https://quickwit.io

We tested S3 Express for our search engine quickwit[0] a couple of weeks ago.

While this was really satisfying on the performance side, we were a bit disappointed by the price, and I mostly agree with the article on this matter.

I can see some very specific use cases where the pricing should be OK but currently, I would say most of our users should just stay on the classic S3 and add some local SSD caching if they have a lot of requests.

[0] https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit/

Hi HN, I’m one of the builders of Quickwit, a cloud-native OSS search engine for observability. As of 2023, we support logs and traces, metrics will come in 2024.

You know the pitch: while software like Datadog or Splunk are great, they often comes with hefty price tags. Our mission is to offer an affordable alternative. So we’ve built Quickwit, we’ve made it compatible with the observabilty ecosystem (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Grafana) and above all, we’ve made it cost-efficient / “easy” to scale (well it’s never easy to scale to petabytes..).

To give you a glance at the engine performance I made a benchmark on the GitHub Archive dataset, 23 TB of events, here are the main observations:

Indexing: costs $2 per ingested TB. With 4CPU, throughput is at 20MBs However, you'll observe > 30MB throughput on simpler datasets, like logs and traces.

Search: a typical query costs $0.0002 per TB (considering both CPU time and GET request costs). Using 8CPU, a simple query on 23TB is achieved in under a second.

Storage: on S3, it costs $8 per ingested TB per month on the GitHub Archive dataset. With logs and traces, you might see costs around $5/ingested TB due to a 2x better compression ratio.

I'm eager to get your thoughts on this!

Benchmark: https://quickwit.io/blog/benchmarking-quickwit-engine-on-an-...

Github repo: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit/

Website: https://quickwit.io/

- On S3, it costs $8 per ingested TB per month on the GitHub Archive dataset. With logs and traces, you might see costs around $4/ingested TB due to a 2x better compression ratio.

I'm eager to get your thoughts on this!

[0] Benchmark: https://quickwit.io/blog/benchmarking-quickwit-engine-on-an-...

Quickwit (https://quickwit.io/) | Paris, France | Onsite and remote (based in Europe) | Full-time

The company is fully remote but we also have a small office in Paris. We prefer candidates based in Europe but can make exceptions for the right profiles.

- Senior Software Engineer 80-110k€ + 0.25-1% equity based on experience.

    We’re looking for a senior software engineer to contribute to [Quickwit](https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit), our open-source search and analytics engine. We have an ambitious roadmap for the next 18 months (performance optimization, distributed storage, support for SQL, query optimizer, revamp of our execution engine, etc.), and this is a great opportunity to shape the future of Quickwit while tackling fun and challenging problems in the field of distributed databases.

In our latest blog post, we walk you through the steps of instrumenting your Rust application and monitoring the performance on Grafana using Quickwit + Jaeger.

Link: https://github.com/quickwit-oss/quickwit

[2] https://app.highlight.io/error-tags

[2] https://github.com/highlight/highlight/tree/main

We have an SDK request here: https://github.com/highlight/highlight/issues/4225

We don't have a particular leaning towards javascript, but haven't gotten to PHP yet. We're definitely open to contributors, but otherwise, we can hopefully get to this in the coming months.

Hi Hacker News! We’re Jay and Vadim from Highlight.io (https://highlight.io). We’re building a truly open source [1] observability platform for modern web applications. We posted some of our tools to HN in recent months [2][3]. Today, we’re excited to formally launch the project, share more about where we’re going, and of course, poll the community for some feedback.

A bit of background: Vadim and I have worked at quite a few startups at this point, and a recurring challenge we’ve faced was tracing usability issues on the frontend to downstream errors and logs on the server. Understanding the real reason behind customer issues was always a chaotic juggling of multiple tools. With the rise of "frontend-forward" frameworks such as NextJS, which blur the boundary between the client and server, the complexity of tracing these issues is only growing.

This is where Highlight.io comes in: our product bridges the gap between client and server to give you a holistic view of your entire application.

At its core, Highlight.io has three main “products”: Session Replay, Error Monitoring, and Logging. The novelty here is not in each product but in how they are connected. For example, in Highlight.io it’s very easy to click from a given error to the associated user session where it is thrown [4], and from a given error, you can easily inspect all of the logs that fired leading up to it. Ensuring that all of our products work together seamlessly with little to no effort is a core principle of our product strategy. If you’re using a common framework [5], for example, we’ll automatically link your frontend sessions with backend errors and logs. No agents, configuring facets, or anything else, It just works.

We depend on several open source projects that help us move quickly. OpenTelemetry (OTEL) [6] is one of them, which helps us with maintainability, i.e. for every language that we support, we only maintain a thin wrapper around its respective OTEL SDK. OTEL is also a great way to enable the community to contribute, and we’re already seeing traction in this space (ie. an open source contributor built a wrapper for a Java SDK [7]).

rrweb [8] is another project we leverage heavily for our session replay product. It drives our ability to record and replay the DOM to visualize user flows in the frontend. We’ve had the privilege to work closely with the rrweb team to ship improvements, and we’re now actively sponsoring the project [9].

ClickHouse [10] has recently become a loved database on our team, as we historically used Opensearch for search-heavy workloads and started to hit growing pains with ingest throughput. We recently rolled it out for our logging product [3] and plan to replace our sessions and errors (and upcoming tracing work) with the database as well.

From a business perspective, Highlight.io is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, and we make money with our hosted product [11]. For the hosted product, you can set billing caps for each offering and we don’t charge for seats. At this point, we have 100+ companies paying for our product (some of which are large enterprises), and thousands of sole developers use Highlight.io every week.

On our roadmap [12] for the future includes metrics, tracing, release management and more. We also are launching several updates this week on our launch week page [13].

Overall, we’re excited to be sharing Highlight.io with the world, and Vadim and I are particularly excited to get some feedback from the HN community. Please give us a test-drive at https://app.highlight.io and let us know what you think. We would love to learn about what you wish you had in an observability product as well as any other experiences and ideas in this space. We look forward to hearing from you!

https://gitlab.com/hyperlink-academy/app https://github.com/highlight/highlight https://github.com/calcom/cal.com https://github.com/Nutlope/roomGPT

I'd be curious to hear how this compares to

https://qryn.metrico.in

and

https://github.com/highlight/highlight

(There are some interesting comparisons/comments vs signoiz in sibling threads).

We only scratched the surface of vanilla-extract here, so check out the documentation if you’re interested in learning more. We’ll continue to share about how we are leveraging it to build the Highlight design system, and all our code is open source if you’re interested in exploring our usage more. All the code for the examples in this article are also available for anyone to fork and play around with as well.