What it is

Uptrace is open source APM platform for modern applications. It sits in Infrastructure & Operations / Monitoring & Observability ecosystem. It supports OpenTelemetry traces, metrics, logs. It gives one interface for application monitoring, distributed tracing, performance monitoring, and log inspection. README says it comes with query builder, rich dashboards, alerting rules, notifications, and integrations for most languages and frameworks. It is written in Go and licensed AGPL-3.0.

Problem it solves: teams need see traces, metrics, logs in one place. Paid APM tools cost high. Uptrace lets teams collect OpenTelemetry data, store it in ClickHouse, query spans/metrics/logs, build dashboards, set alerts, troubleshoot issues. It also requires PostgreSQL database for metadata such as metric names and alerts. It can process billions of spans and metrics on single server. It positions as open alternative to Datadog.

Key capabilities

• Single UI for traces, metrics, logs, with query builder and rich dashboards.
• 50+ pre-built dashboards auto-created once metrics start coming in.
• Service graph and chart annotations.
• Monitoring for spans, logs, metrics with notifications via Email, Slack, WebHook, AlertManager.
• SQL-like query language to aggregate spans; PromQL-like language to aggregate metrics.
• Data ingestion via OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Vector, FluentBit, CloudWatch, and more; integrations for most languages and frameworks.
• Grafana compatibility as Tempo/Prometheus datasource; user/project management via YAML; SSO via OpenID Connect with Keycloak, Google Cloud, Cloudflare.

Who uses it and how

• Application teams monitor services and troubleshoot issues with traces, metrics, logs.
• Self-hosted deployments collect OpenTelemetry data, store spans/metrics in ClickHouse, metadata in PostgreSQL.
• Operators build dashboards, service graphs, annotations, alert rules for performance monitoring.
• Grafana users query Uptrace as Tempo/Prometheus datasource.
• Organizations manage users/projects via YAML and use OpenID Connect SSO.

Getting started

Try Uptrace in cloud demo at app.uptrace.dev/play without login, or run locally with Docker using example/docker. Then follow getting started guide.

When to use it — and when not to

Use Uptrace when you want self-hosted OpenTelemetry APM and can operate ClickHouse plus PostgreSQL. It positions as open alternative to Datadog; README claims 10x lower cost, more than 10K spans/second on single core, 1KB span compressed to ~40 bytes. Avoid it when you want zero-ops hosted monitoring, or when repo facts matter: 0 contributors, 0 years repo age, 52 open issues, 4284 stars, 215 forks, last push 2026-08-13T14:47:22Z, AGPL-3.0 license.