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Top 23 Observability Open-Source Projects
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Project mention: Best Open Source Monitoring Tools in 2026: 7 Self-Hosted Options Compared | dev.to | 2026-06-13
Netdata is a real-time infrastructure monitoring agent that collects metrics at per-second granularity with near-zero configuration. Install the agent on a server, and within seconds you have 2,000+ metrics being collected — CPU, memory, disk I/O, network, processes, containers, and hundreds of application-specific collectors. The level of instant visibility is unmatched.
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AppSignal
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
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langfuse
🪢 Open source agent evals & observability: Trace, evaluate, and improve LLM applications with one open platform.
Project mention: Iris vs Langfuse vs Phoenix vs Promptfoo: where each wins, where each loses | dev.to | 2026-10-01Langfuse: "MIT licensed, except for the ee folders" (repository); part of ClickHouse since January 2026 (announcement).
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signoz
SigNoz is an open-source, OpenTelemetry-native observability platform for your team and their AI agents. Get logs, metrics, and traces in one tool with features like APM, distributed tracing, log management, infra monitoring, etc. Combined with SigNoz MCP and a native AI teammate (in SigNoz Cloud) it helps you build more resilient apps.
Project mention: Why ClickHouse® fills the disk in self-hosted Langfuse and SigNoz, and how to fix it | dev.to | 2026-09-25 -
MLflow
The open source AI engineering platform for agents, LLMs, and ML models. MLflow enables teams of all sizes to debug, evaluate, monitor, and optimize production-quality AI applications while controlling costs and managing access to models and data.
The last layer is where the tables get used. MLflow records runs of whatever you compute from them, whether that's model training or a scheduled metric: parameters, metrics and artifacts, all searchable later. Here it keeps its metadata in the stack's Postgres and its artifacts in the SeaweedFS bucket.
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Project mention: War Story: Debugging a Kafka 4.0 Consumer Lag Spike During a Product Launch Using Cilium 1.17 and Datadog 2026 | dev.to | 2026-04-28
This adds less than 2% overhead to your node’s CPU usage but exposes 14 Kafka-specific eBPF metrics that are critical for debugging lag. We’ve found that 72% of Kafka 4.0 lag incidents we’ve responded to in 2026 stem from node-level network policy issues that only eBPF can detect. If you’re using a different CNI, you can still use Cilium’s standalone eBPF probe https://github.com/cilium/cilium/tree/v1.17.2/contrib/kafka-probe to get these metrics without replacing your entire CNI. Always validate that kafka.heartbeat_drops_total is 0 in staging before every launch.
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Project mention: volnux VS Prefect - a user suggested alternative | libhunt.com/r/volnux | 2025-11-19
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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Project mention: My First Day With OpenTelemetry: Spans That Arrive but Measure Nothing | dev.to | 2026-08-07
$ curl -sSL -o jaeger.tar.gz \ https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger/releases/download/v2.20.0/jaeger-2.20.0-darwin-arm64.tar.gz $ tar xzf jaeger.tar.gz && ./jaeger-2.20.0-darwin-arm64/jaeger
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Self-Hosting-Guide
Self-Hosting Guide. Learn all about locally hosting (on premises & private web servers) and managing software applications by yourself or your organization. Including Cloud, LLMs, WireGuard, Automation, Home Assistant, and Networking.
"Self-Hosting Guide" - GitHub repository by mikeroyal documenting self-hosted alternatives to cloud services. Available at: https://github.com/mikeroyal/Self-Hosting-Guide
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Project mention: We Cut Log Costs by 35% Using Vector 0.30 and Loki 3.0: Lessons from a 3-Month Tuning | dev.to | 2026-05-04
We evaluated three alternatives: ClickHouse for log storage, Fluent Bit for log collection, and the Vector (https://github.com/vectordotdev/vector) + Loki (https://github.com/grafana/loki) stack. ClickHouse had great query performance but required manual index management, which would add operational overhead. Fluent Bit was lightweight but lacked the transform capabilities we needed to mask PII and drop low-value logs. Vector and Loki stood out: Vector is a Rust-based agent with 1/10th the memory footprint of Filebeat, and Loki is designed for cost-efficient log storage with a query model that aligns with how our team actually debugs (using labels, not full-text search).
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openobserve
Open source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, RUM (web, android, ios), Session replay, pipelines, SLO and LLM observability. A sophisticated, simple and highly performant alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch with 140x lower storage costs and single binary deployment.
Project mention: Traceway: MIT-licensed observability stack you can self-host in ~90s | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-05-11You should take a look at https://github.com/openobserve/openobserve - Extremely performant and simple full-stack observability solution?
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agents-towards-production
End-to-end, code-first tutorials for building production-grade GenAI agents. From prototype to enterprise deployment.
Project mention: Show HN: GibRAM an in-memory ephemeral GraphRAG runtime for retrieval | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-01-17GraphRAG's approach certainly makes sense for regulation-heavy documents, where interconnected references can be critical for retrieval quality. The challenge you mentioned about separate systems for graph storage and vector indexing resonates with what we've seen in the field. In practice, this separation often adds unnecessary complexity for ephemeral analysis tasks. One thing we've explored is using a dual-memory architecture, which might be relevant here even in an in-memory context. It allows you to effectively manage recent context and longer-term semantic connections without the overhead of persistent storage. If you're interested in seeing how this approach could be integrated into production systems, I wrote up some patterns that might be useful: https://github.com/NirDiamant/agents-towards-production.
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Project mention: OTel Isn't Going Well (and I Made a Spreadsheet About It) | news.ycombinator.com | 2026-08-22
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Distributed tracing as a discipline is older than most engineers writing about it think. Google's 2010 Dapper paper, by Sigelman and colleagues, is the canonical reference; Twitter open-sourced Zipkin in 2012 as a Dapper-inspired implementation, and Uber open-sourced Jaeger in 2017 on similar lineage. For most of the 2010s, however, the operational reality was vendor-specific: each APM (Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Dynatrace) shipped its own SDK, and instrumenting an application meant choosing a vendor and accepting that the instrumentation work was, structurally, lock-in.
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kubesphere
The container platform tailored for Kubernetes multi-cloud, datacenter, and edge management ⎈ 🖥 ☁️
Project mention: Deploy KubeSphere and Kubernetes on Amazon EC2 in All in One Mode | dev.to | 2026-09-06##################################################### ### Welcome to KubeSphere! ### ##################################################### Console: http://172.31.38.43:30880 Account: admin Password: P@88w0rd NOTES： 1. After you log into the console, please check the monitoring status of service components in "Cluster Management". If any service is not ready, please wait patiently until all components are up and running. 2. Please change the default password after login. ##################################################### https://kubesphere.io 2023-11-19 05:43:59 ##################################################### 05:44:00 UTC success: [kubesphere-master] 05:44:00 UTC Pipeline[CreateClusterPipeline] execute successfully Installation is complete. Please check the result using the command: kubectl logs -n kubesphere-system $(kubectl get pod -n kubesphere-system -l 'app in (ks-install, ks-installer)' -o jsonpath='{.items[0].metadata.name}') -f
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Almost every single JavaScript package is on NPM. Being on NPM does not automatically increase your attack vectors. The vast majority of the npm attacks have been "Supply Chain Attacks"[1] where an upstream dependency is injected with malicious code, then automatically downloaded and executed when users update a package. If you look at Effect's package.json on GitHub[0], you'll see that they have several "devDependencies", but no regular "dependencies". That means, unless you are working on the package itself, using it does not require downloading any other packages whatsoever. Thus, Effect is not susceptible to any of the issues that you have read about in the news. The only way malicious code could be transported through the package would be if the maintainers suddenly became evil.
That being said, I don't use Effect and I think it's kind of overrated by the FP community. But, I appreciate the ideas behind it, and I felt the need to educate you about your needless fear of any library simply existing on NPM.
[0] https://github.com/Effect-TS/effect/blob/main/package.json
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thanos
Highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities. A CNCF Incubating project.
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kubeshark
eBPF-powered network observability for Kubernetes. Indexes L4/L7 traffic with full K8s context, decrypts TLS without keys. Queryable by AI agents via MCP and humans via dashboard.
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Project mention: The None That Broke Permissions: How a Single Null Crashed Hermes Agent Approvals | dev.to | 2026-07-24
Project PR Title Type PR Link topoteretes/cognee fix(lancedb): automatically prefix windows paths to resolve OS Error 3 for long paths bug fix https://github.com/topoteretes/cognee/pull/3123 NousResearch/hermes-agent fix(permissions): handle None response from ACP request_permission bug fix https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent/pull/13457 Tracer-Cloud/opensre fix: Database logic expansion for QA Edge Cases Batch 2 bug fix https://github.com/Tracer-Cloud/opensre/pull/626 openclaw/openclaw test: make install-safe-path symlink tests compatible with Windows bug fix https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pull/90275 google-gemini/gemini-cli feat(ui): remove write todo list tool from UI tips cleanup bug https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/pull/22281
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Project mention: VoltAgent Just Asked Us to Build Their Guardrail Provider Interface. Here Is What We Shipped. | dev.to | 2026-03-20
VoltAgent is a 6.8k-star TypeScript framework for building AI agents. They already had InputGuardrail and OutputGuardrail types — handler functions that run before and after model calls.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
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A note from our sponsor - AppSignal
www.appsignal.com | 5 Oct 2026
Index
What are some of the best open-source Observability projects? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Netdata | 80,790 |
| 2 | langfuse | 35,324 |
| 3 | signoz | 32,253 |
| 4 | MLflow | 28,216 |
| 5 | cilium | 25,585 |
| 6 | skywalking | 24,966 |
| 7 | Prefect | 23,960 |
| 8 | jaeger | 23,267 |
| 9 | Self-Hosting-Guide | 22,839 |
| 10 | vector | 22,667 |
| 11 | openobserve | 22,211 |
| 12 | agents-towards-production | 21,517 |
| 13 | kibana | 21,304 |
| 14 | VictoriaMetrics | 17,800 |
| 15 | zipkin | 17,468 |
| 16 | kubesphere | 17,059 |
| 17 | effect | 16,940 |
| 18 | thanos | 14,226 |
| 19 | nightingale | 13,316 |
| 20 | kubeshark | 12,094 |
| 21 | pyroscope | 11,690 |
| 22 | opensre | 11,327 |
| 23 | voltagent | 10,712 |
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AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed.
Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
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