Vishal Sharma

Maintainer, SigNoz

Shey shared his challenges with configuring APM dashboards in Grafana, stating, "I had to modify them to work with multiple environments. The idea of a service is very lost in Grafana. It's not a very obvious type thing. There is no concept of service and that affects the dashboards as well."

Customer Story: HTTPScout

Industry: Web Monitoring
Website: httpscout.io
Founder: Sheheryar Sewani
Company Size: Solo Entrepreneur
Solution: Self-hosted SigNoz

The Challenge

When seasoned backend developer Shey launched httpscout, a website uptime monitoring service, he faced a common dilemma:

• Need for robust application observability
• Limited budget for expensive enterprise solutions
• Lack of time for complex setup and maintenance

"I didn't want to leak money to Datadog or New Relic while I don't have any customers," Shey explained.

The Grafana Hurdle

Initially, Shey considered using Grafana, inspired by its popularity among Rails developers. However, he quickly encountered several challenges:

• Complex Setup: Grafana required significant time investment to configure
• Custom Dashboard Creation: Building useful dashboards from scratch was time-consuming
• Lack of Integrated Tracing: Grafana didn't offer the tracing capabilities Shey needed out of the box
• Limited Service Concept: The idea of a "service" wasn't well-defined in Grafana, making multi-environment setups difficult

Additionally, integrating all three signals—traces, logs, and metrics—into a single pane of glass was significantly easier with SigNoz. This comprehensive observability from a single platform simplified Shey’s workflow and enhanced overall productivity. Instead of juggling multiple tools or dealing with complex setups, Shey could focus on what mattered most: developing and improving HTTP Scout.

"Even if I hook up the data, I still have to import graphs into Grafana or make a graph myself, like a dashboard myself, to do all those things," Shey noted.

Enter SigNoz

SigNoz's self-hosted, open-source solution was the perfect fit, democratizing access to high-quality observability tools.

Shey knew about the importance of distributed tracing in applications having seen the benefits before. He wanted to set up tracing for httpscout with Grafana, but quickly realized it wasn't a great fit.

Key Benefits

1. Easy setup: Quick configuration with Docker Compose
2. Out-of-the-box functionality: Immediate useful visualizations
3. OpenTelemetry Native: Future-proof investment
4. Single Pane of Glass: Integrating traces, logs, and metrics into a single application simplifies observability and improves efficiency.
5. Comprehensive features: Integrated tracing, exception tracking, and performance monitoring
6. Exception Tracking: Built-in exception tracking through open telemetry gems provided immediate visibility into production issues, helping maintain application reliability.
7. Cost-effective self-hosting: No ongoing subscription costs
8. Community Support: The active and supportive SigNoz community provided valuable insights and assistance, ensuring a smooth experience for small teams and solo developers.

The Impact

For Shey, SigNoz embodied the democratization of observability:

"What I want from SigNoz is for it to just work, so I can go back to my other important work. And it is working. It did exactly what I wanted. So I love it's working. I'm happy."

SigNoz allowed Shey to:

• Implement enterprise-grade observability features
• Focus on core business development
• Scale monitoring capabilities alongside business growth

Why It Matters

SigNoz is changing the game for small companies and side projects:

• Provides enterprise-level features without enterprise-level complexity or cost
• Empowers solo developers and small teams to implement robust monitoring
• Scales with projects, eliminating need for future painful migrations

As Vishal from SigNoz puts it:

"We want to democratize observability. We want to make sure that people in smaller teams are able to deploy full stack observability (Datadog/New Relic) like features, even in the free version."

The Future

By making advanced observability accessible to projects of all sizes, SigNoz is:

• Empowering a new generation of developers and entrepreneurs
• Enabling the creation of more reliable, performant applications from day one
• Leveling the playing field in application performance and reliability

Ready to democratize observability for your project? Get started with SigNoz today!

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