OpenObserve.ai: High-Performance, Cost-Efficient Observability at Scale

OpenObserve.ai is a cloud-native, petabyte-scale observability platform designed for engineering teams and DevOps professionals who need to monitor logs, metrics, traces, and frontend performance with unmatched speed and efficiency. Built in Rust and leveraging advanced technologies like columnar storage, Apache Parquet, and DataFusion, it delivers 140x lower storage costs than Elasticsearch while supporting real-time analytics, alerting, and flexible pipelines. With full compatibility for OpenTelemetry, Kubernetes, and major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP), it offers seamless integration and deployment via AWS Marketplace or Heroku, making it ideal for organizations migrating from legacy systems or managing cloud-native applications. The platform supports both self-hosted open-source use and cloud deployment, with enterprise-grade features like SSO, RBAC, and SOC2 Type II compliance.

Key Features:

• Unified observability for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring (RUM)
• Petabyte-scale data handling with stateless node architecture for horizontal scalability
• 140x lower storage costs compared to Elasticsearch using high compression (~40x) and columnar storage
• Real-time analytics and fast query performance via SIMD acceleration and vectorized processing
• Direct querying of Parquet files using the DataFusion engine
• Pay-as-you-go, usage-based pricing model for cloud deployment (starting June 2, 2025)
• 14-day free trial available for new cloud customers
• Support for Bring Your Own Bucket (local disk, S3, MinIO, GCS, Azure Blob Storage)
• Advanced pipelines and enrichment tables for data transformation
• Alerting with VRL (Vector Runtime Language) and customizable rules
• Interactive dashboards and visualizations
• Action scripts for automated responses (e.g., $1 per 1K runs)
• OpenTelemetry compatibility and integration with Prometheus, AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, databases, and tools like Filebeat, Fluent-bit, Vector, and otel-collector
• Full-text search, SQL functions, and approximate aggregate functions (e.g., approx_topk, approx-topk-distinct)
• Support for session replay, error tracking, and multi-tenancy
• Enterprise features: SSO, custom auth providers (Okta, Microsoft Entra), SLA guarantees, and priority support
• Self-hosted open-source version available under AGPL-3.0 license with no usage charges
• Community support via Slack and GitHub Discussions
• Grafana plugin and integration with systemd, mimalloc, and other performance-optimized tools

Pricing: OpenObserve.ai offers a flexible pricing model with a 14-day free trial for new cloud customers. Starting June 2, 2025, the cloud service transitions to a usage-based model: $0.30 per GB for logs, metrics, and traces; $0.01 per GB for query volume; $0.20 per GB for pipeline processing; $0.45 per GB for remote destinations; $1 per 1K RUM & Session Replay sessions; $0.15 per 1K Error Tracking events; and $1 per 1K Action Script runs. Extended data retention and priority support are available in the Enterprise Cloud plan. The self-hosted open-source version remains completely free, ideal for teams seeking full control and no operational overhead. Existing free-tier users receive a 30-day grace period before new pricing applies.

Conclusion: OpenObserve.ai stands out as a powerful, future-ready observability platform that combines open-source transparency with enterprise-grade performance, making it a top choice for modern engineering teams and organizations seeking scalable, cost-effective, and high-speed monitoring solutions.