Grafana stack is cool. It solved the problem around observability for the first time in a neat and light way. Think about it however, for someone setting up their observability stack they will need to setup 4 components: Grafana (dashboarding), Loki (logs), Mimir (Metrics) and Tempo (Traces). This is a lot of work and a lot of moving parts. It is also a lot of work to maintain and upgrade. Loki, Mimir and Tempo have their own querying languages and their own quirks. Good amount of stuff to learn. It is really hard for a small team to learn and maintain all of this. Junior engineers really struggle with this and seniors resent the time they have to spend on this. Loki also has issues around high cardinality, which is a problem for many teams.

We need something new and better.

We made sure to build a solution that is easy to setup and maintain. One single binary/container for single node setup and one stack to setup/upgrade/maintain for HA setup.

We also made sure that it is easy to use and learn. We allow standard SQL to be used for querying logs, metrics and traces - nothing extra to learn here. Metrics querying is supported using PromQL too. Drag and drop for creating panels and dashboards is there too :-).

Dashboarding is supported within the same stack. No need to setup Grafana or something else separately.

OpenObserve also offer functions that grafana stack does not offer. Give it a shot, you are going to love it.

Data is stored in open parquet format, allowing its usage even outside of OpenObserve if so desired.

Hope this helps.