TL;DR — Quick Summary

OpenObserve is a lightweight observability platform for logs, metrics, and traces. 140x less storage than Elasticsearch, single binary, built-in UI — self-hosted Datadog alternative.

OpenObserve — logs, metrics, traces. 140x less storage. Single binary. Built-in UI.

Installation

# Single binary
curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/openobserve/openobserve/main/download.sh | sh

# Docker
docker run -p 5080:5080 -e ZO_ROOT_USER_EMAIL=root@example.com \
  -e ZO_ROOT_USER_PASSWORD=ComplexPass#123 openobserve/openobserve

# Default: http://localhost:5080

Usage

# Send logs via API
curl http://localhost:5080/api/default/logs/_json \
  -u root@example.com:ComplexPass#123 \
  -d '[{"message": "hello from curl"}]'

# Search with SQL
SELECT * FROM logs WHERE message LIKE '%error%' ORDER BY _timestamp DESC

# Ingest with Fluent Bit
# Configure output to http://localhost:5080/api/default/logs

Summary

  • OpenObserve handles logs, metrics, and traces
  • 140x less storage than Elasticsearch
  • Single binary, no Java/JVM dependency
  • Built-in UI with dashboards and alerts
  • Written in Rust — fast, resource-efficient