OpenObserve Reviews & Product Details

I self-host OpenObserve to collect logs and traces from my projects, and the biggest win for me was how easy it was to get running. It ships as a single binary, and I had it ingesting data within minutes—without having to stand up Elasticsearch or maintain separate Prometheus and Jaeger stacks. It also accepts OpenTelemetry natively, so I simply pointed my existing OTel exporter at it and the data appeared right away.

Having logs, metrics, and traces in one UI saves me a lot of time when debugging, because I can jump from an error log to the related trace in just a couple of clicks. Queries are plain SQL as well, so there’s no new query language to learn. Storage efficiency is another plus: the data is kept as compressed Parquet, which really matters when you’re paying for your own infrastructure. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The documentation doesn’t always keep pace with how quickly new versions ship, so I sometimes had to dig through GitHub issues or release notes just to understand a particular setting. Building dashboards also takes more effort than in Grafana, and there are fewer ready-made templates to use as a starting point. On top of that, some of the more advanced features are limited to the Enterprise edition. That said, Enterprise is free below a daily ingestion limit, which feels fair for smaller setups. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

A single OpenObserve pod served as a drop-in replacement for our full ELK stack, making the management of our logging infrastructure significantly easier and cheaper.

It worked with our existing Fluent Bit forwarders with only minimal changes. The UI was clean and intuitive enough that end users had no trouble switching over from Kibana. Being able to store data in S3 not only saved us money, but also improved maintenance and performance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Since we’ve been using OpenObserve for over two years, we’ve run into a few deployment hurdles, especially with the earlier versions. Provisioning the stack could be about 95% automated out of the box, but we still hit difficulties with a few other tasks, like setting up UDS or changing the admin password. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like OpenObserve for its speed and flexibility, particularly when handling queries with both PromQL and SQL. The AI integration is also really beneficial. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The Kubernetes operator that we're using with OpenObserve could support more types, which feels a bit limiting. Additionally, the user management aspect could be simplified. It would be great to have service accounts for the OpenObserve API managed by the Kubernetes operator, and a streamlined way to manage users and roles across all organizations instead of handling them individually. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love OpenObserve for its simplicity and low cost, especially since it offers everything I used to have in Splunk but cheaper. I appreciate the ability to self-host, which was smooth to set up with ECS Fargate. The community is also great, being really approachable and quick in development, like with the Terraform provider and MCP Server capabilities. Building dashboards and alerts is straightforward because it uses custom SQL. Overall, OpenObserve provides a full solution for my custom scripts automation and integrates data webhooks efficiently into a single pane of glass. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Using DEX for OKTA SSO with OpenObserve requires an enterprise license, which I find less than ideal. I wish this capability could be provided natively rather than relying on the DEX broker. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I use OpenObserve for several internal projects and appreciate how easy it was to set up. It handles high volumes of logs without breaking a sweat and is super fast to query, making troubleshooting a breeze. What stands out to me is how OpenObserve brings logs, metrics, and traces into one place, and querying logs using standard SQL and metrics with PromQL is a huge advantage. The open-source, cloud-native nature offers amazing value, making it a really cost-effective alternative. Having everything centralized saves us from jumping between tools and makes incident tracking simpler. The system is easy to learn since our team was already familiar with PromQL and SQL, saving us time during our transition. Additionally, the support team was helpful, making dashboard and alert migrations easy with AI tools like Claude. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I think the UI can be improved to make it easier for new users to navigate. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I love the friendly and welcoming community of OpenObserve, which has been a great learning experience and very helpful. The product's code base is well-structured and polished, and even when I run it locally, it's impressive. OpenObserve's technical part is appealing with its ability to integrate into a lot of applications and to customize observability as needed. The fast nature due to Rust is a plus. It provides a comprehensive platform for observability, including AI observability, LLM observability, and more, and offers different solutions for cloud and network monitoring. I appreciate the over 170 official integrations, making it flexible for various use cases. Additionally, the initial setup was easy, thanks to the clear contributing guidelines and standards compliance. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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OpenObserve is very easy to install. I was able to get started with it in a short time by following the guides. And it is very light on compute resources which is one of the key strengths of it. The documentation was also easy to understand and covered what I wanted to know. And when I couldn't find something there, I asked questions in the Slack channel. The OpenObserve team was very responsive and they solved my problems Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Features are restricted by the pricing tier. E.g. SSO for the dashboard is not available in the free version Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like OpenObserve because the platform is easy to use and very beginner-friendly. I use otel to record traces and logs, and switching from a different vendor to OpenObserve felt hassle-free and straightforward. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

In today’s world, everything is getting connected to agentic AI, such as Codex and Claude. The fact that OpenObserve doesn’t have a connector is something I really dislike. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that OpenObserve offers an intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easy to navigate and use effectively. The excellent compression of logs is a major benefit, as it helps us preserve valuable disk space. Additionally, the setup was very easy by integrating it with our existing Kubernetes cluster via their Helm chart. I appreciate the clean and familiar interface (previously using GCP Logs Explorer) and the ability to keep everything within our network, which was a key reason for switching. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

No real dislikes, but the enriching could be a little more intuitive / an interactive builder for functions. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

OpenObserve is easy to set up, easy to use, and easy to get value from. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Sometimes I get surprised by how much money I can spend on a search request. I wish there was more visibility into, "Hey, this request you are running is going to query a ton of data and cost a non-trivial amount of time and money"... But that could also be a skill gap. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.