Alternatives
Products that do what Build a log explorer in minutes and scale it to billions (for real) does
Built a log explorer because it's a common, hard and painful problem for devs, but wanted to showcase the process and some tips for scaling that can be applied to similar use cases. Hope you can learn something new · How it started => https://www.tinybird.co/blog-posts/build-a-datadog-alternati... · How I scaled it => https://www.tinybird.co/blog-posts/build-a-datadog-alternati... · My Cursor + sonnet process => https://x.com/alrocar/status/1892653985330258283 · GitHub repo =>…
- 1SO
We just released a major upgrade to SigNoz with support for Logs management based on ClickHouse. Would love to get any feedback from the community here on what you think and any questions you may have for us Many big companies like Uber and Cloudflare have been shifting to ClickHouse as their main workhorse for Logs management seeing much better performance. for e.g Cloudflare recently shifted from Elastic to ClickHouse and are seeing 8x improvement in memory/cpu resource requirement in ingestion. This is our first release with Logs support and we have added support for: - Filtering…
2022 · github.com
- 2WB
Hey hn! I'm one of the co-founders of highlight.io, an open source monitoring tool. Today we're sharing a ClickHouse-based logging solution we've been working on. We wanted to showcase how we built it and share how you could try it out to give feedback. Since we started working on highlight.io, we've been hyper-focused on "cohesion", or ensuring that when you install your monitoring stack, all of the resources in that stack (user interactions, requests, traces, logs, etc.) are connected in a consumable way. We've written up more about our philosophy on this here [1]. We started building…
2023 · github.com
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- 5TA
Hey everyone! I’m working on Telescope - an open-source web-based log viewer designed to make working with logs stored in ClickHouse easier and more intuitive. I wasn’t happy with existing log viewers - most of them force a specific log format, are tied to ingestion pipelines, or are just a small part of a larger platform. Others didn’t display logs the way I wanted. So I decided to build my own lightweight, flexible log viewer - one that actually fits my needs. Check it out: Video demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IItMOXwugY GitHub:…
2025 · github.com
- 6NF
For more background and technical details, I wrote this up as well: https://dmitryfrank.com/projects/nerdlog/article
2025 · github.com
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- 8LS
Hey HN! I’m Karan, creator of Logchef (https://logchef.app), an open-source log viewer built specifically for exploring logs stored in ClickHouse. This tool grew directly out of my $day job managing massive log volumes. Like many orgs, we migrated our log workloads to ClickHouse for its performance, but found the ecosystem lacked dedicated UI tooling for actually browsing and analyzing those logs effectively. We were using Metabase, and while great for general BI, it wasn't designed for log exploration workflows. Common pain points included: - Clunky Ad-hoc Querying:…
2025 · github.com
- 9SA
Hi all! I built Spikelog because I kept wanting to track simple numbers over time but every time I looked at proper observability tools, I'd bounce off the setup complexity. I wanted to make something that didn't require a lot of thinking to use. Spikelog is made to be as simple as possible: - POST a JSON with chart name + value (you can add some tags as well but I've not tested this part works yet) - Chart appears automatically - 1,000 point rolling window per chart (old data expires, no retention config) - Max 10 charts That's basically the whole product. I built it in about a day using…
Nov 2025 · spikelog.com
- 10CA
A recent HackerNews comment - “For one programmer's hourly cost, you could run 4000 CPU cores continuously. Can there really be no practical way to apply thousands of cores to boosting the programmer's productivity?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19339467 This is what we have come up with. The current productivity tools - Slack, Asana, Trello, Facebook Workplace, etc. - are great, but lack direct access to your code. Building a tool directly around the code makes it more powerful for software developers: CoDiff. https://codiff.com The foundation of CoDiff is a…
2019
- 11QG
I built qlog because I got tired of waiting for grep to search through gigabytes of logs. qlog uses an inverted index (like search engines) to search millions of log lines in milliseconds. It's 10-100x faster than grep and way simpler than setting up Elasticsearch. Features: - Lightning fast indexing (1M+ lines/sec using mmap) - Sub-millisecond searches on indexed data - Beautiful terminal output with context lines - Auto-detects JSON, syslog, nginx, apache formats - Zero configuration - Works offline - Pure Python Example: qlog index './logs/*/*.log' qlog search "error"…
Mar 2026 · github.com
- 12NO
Morning HN - - I have a quick story about building a startup and misreading the market, and an ask. (The ask: Try out our product>> https://app.datable.io/auth/sandbox) My name is Julian Giuca and I was an early employee at New Relic, where I led their Logging product until 2022. It’s safe to say I have opinions about logs. Sometimes I think they are great. Too often I think we can do much better. When people talk to me about logs, they reliably complain about observability costs. Engineering leaders have said it feels “like a protection racket”, where you're forced to…
2025
- 13DO
Oh, hello. I didn't see you there. Did you ever wonder what it takes to build and launch a software product from scratch? Not a high-level summary. Not a short essay that describes a year of development. Detailed, day to day activities. A captain's log. Mistakes and pivots. Technology choices. Marketing activities. Design considerations. You might know me as the creator of SumatraPDF. I'm starting a new software product from scratch and I decided to make it an experiment of building in public. I hope to inspire others to build more software by de-mystifying the process of creation. I'm on…
2022
- 14HM
Hi, I'm Marcus. I've spent the last 15 months or so home-coding on a document database, after work, on weekends (every waking hour). My plans for this particular weekend was to implement log-structured writing. It went faster than I thought and the results were faster querying times and fast, append-only writes. I've been working on this for almost a decade and being this close to the finish line feels surreal. This is my seventh iteration I believe. Everytime I realized I had an architecture built on a bad model I walked away, often in fury, depressed over my weak coding abilities but…
2017
- 15LA
Hey HN! We're excited to introduce Logwise, our new AI-powered log analysis tool. (built by two devs who hate logs) Product page: https://logwise.framer.website/ Logwise makes debugging and incident response faster for developers. It uses natural language processing to automatically parse log data, surface insights, and detect anomalies. We built Logwise to eliminate the manual sifting of log analysis. Key features: - Search logs in plain English - no complex queries needed - Auto-generated alerts highlight potential issues - Contextual debugging advice speeds incident…
2023 · logwise.framer.website
- 16OA
Hi HN, I've written the developer tool I've wanted for some time: a process manager and log multiplexer in one. I think of it as a combination of overmind and lnav, both great tools in and of themselves, but focussed on my needs as a developer. I wrote more about it here: https://www.aha.io/engineering/articles/over-it-all Hope someone else finds it useful too.
Jan 2026 · github.com
- 17IM
I spent last 6 months trying to build Simple Ops [1] to democratize website performance monitoring so anyone can use it. A year back, while I was trying to measure performance for Visa List as it became a huge content website with more than 100K pages. Also as data is changing very frequently, it's very hard to keep doing this manually. I searched on google and found that all the solutions are just uptime monitoring and nothing and none of them truly measure performance. So I decided to build one for myself. But it turns out website performance monitoring is not so simple after all and with…
2020
- 18TD
Hey everyone! I hope you’re all having a great day. Today I’m sharing an experimental open-source project I’ve been working on for the past few months called Wildcat. Wildcat is an embedded persistent storage engine implementing an lsm tree similar to RocksDB and or LevelDB. The motivation for this system was to try to solve the multi-writer bottlenecks that most embedded systems incur. With that, during my journey with storage systems especially the log structured flavour I’ve implemented a lot of interesting optimizations and algorithms in regards to the write and read paths. I hope you…
2025 · github.com
- 19IB
I got sick of: - Re-writing the same Terraform for the same common AWS infrastructure - Re-writing the same Rails code to build the same webapp - Re-configuring the same monitoring systems & CI/CD pipelines - Spending a week in dependency & configuration hell wiring it all together When I was launching my first two startups, I wished I had a strong starting point with all of the best practices & technology configured out-of-the-box. Every tool I found wanted to lock me in to some PaaS provider (that might not even exist in a year) who wanted to take a premium on my infrastructure spend…
2024
- 20TL
Hey HN! A bug has been reported. Maybe it’s the data pipeline for a particular customer, checkouts with Paypal in Australia or Bluetooth connections on older Android devices. Whatever the case is, you’re sitting there and there’s simply not enough information to diagnose the issue. Wouldn’t it be great if you could snap your fingers and start looking at DEBUG logs for just the customer in question? We think so too. This was one of the most delightful features that the core platform teams provided me when I worked at a large org and I missed it dearly after I left. Here's what Prefab provides…
2023 · prefab.cloud
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I've built a little prototype a long while back, to help me keep track of visitors on my website. I didn't like google analytics for obvious privacy reasons, and I didn't like the existing self-hosted options because of how complicated they are. I always wanted a simple, basic tool, similar to plausible, but even simpler. So a few weeks ago I rebuilt my prototype into a reusable tool. And I made it open source. I built a website, a documentation, and I'd be excited for someone else to try it too. Who knows, maybe if enough people like the idea, I might even make it into a SaaS to save…
2023 · github.com
- 22VN
I got the idea of [mindmap.so](http://mindmap.so/) out of my own frustration of managing my personal notes in Notion and Miro in parallel. I have built it 3 months back on top of excalidraw, posted it in Reddit a couple of times, and never looked back (was using it only for personal use). Little did I know that the small and nimble tool that I created has crossed 2000+ users (was so surprised when I saw the dashboard last week). It was all organic and word of mouth . Having 2000+ users trusting a product is no easy feat. That’s when I thought may be I should put some more…
2024 · mindmap.so
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- 24GS
Hello all! I built Glintlog because I wanted a simple way to aggregate logs without spinning up Elasticsearch, Loki, or a SaaS that costs my kidney… What it is: A self-hosted log aggregation tool that runs as a single binary. No Docker, no dependencies, no config files required. How it works: ``` curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ibero-data/glintlog/main/s... | bash ``` That's it. Open localhost:8080 and you have a log viewer with search, filtering, and live tail. Tech: - Go backend with embedded DuckDB for storage - Native OTLP support (gRPC on 4317,…
Feb 2026 · glintlog.com
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