Hey everyone! I'm currently using VictoriaMetrics and Grafana for monitoring metrics, and Loki for logs. While ELK is great, it can be a bit pricey, so I've switched to using S3 for storage instead. However, I'm looking to improve my stack with an Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tool. I recently stumbled upon a link for an S3-backed open source APM tool, but I lost it. Meanwhile, I'm considering Tempo since I'm already using the Grafana stack, but I've also seen alternatives like Signoz, OpenObserve, and Elastic APM, which tend to be resource-heavy. I'd prefer something lightweight with S3 compatibility. I mainly host PHP and Python apps—any suggestions? Happy New Year and thanks for your help!
2 Answers
I went through a similar evaluation at my last company and ended up building our own lightweight APM using OpenTelemetry because the ones we tested were too resource-intensive. I suggest looking into Jaeger with an S3 backend—it’s lighter than Tempo, though it may not have all the features. We managed to reduce trace storage by sampling aggressively, around 1%, which helped cut storage needs significantly. Also, I heard HyperDX might be the S3-backed APM you’re thinking of; I've heard positive things about it. For AWS users, CloudWatch Traces could be a cost-effective route if sampling is managed well.
As the founder of OpenObserve, I was surprised to hear it's considered resource-hungry! OpenObserve is optimized for efficiency and can even run on Raspberry Pis. I’d love to know what setup or data volume led to that impression because it really shouldn’t feel heavy at all.
I agree with you! OpenObserve is lightweight but may struggle with large queries across vast datasets.