Omkar Kesarkhane
4b9204f69f
## Problem
The browser journey editor stacked two **always-on** advisory cards
between the toolbar and the first step:
- *"This journey does not verify anything"* — no `assert` step in the
journey
- *"No test attributes found in this recording"* — no step produced a
`test_attribute` locator candidate
Both derived their visibility from the journey's own content, and both
conditions are the normal case for a real recording — so they rendered
on every visit to every affected journey. Each was dismissible, but
dismissal lived in a local `ref(false)`, so it died on remount: authors
closed the same two cards on every visit and still began reading their
steps two cards down the page.
## Change
One warning badge in the Steps toolbar — a warning icon and a count, no
prose:
- **Hover** names it ("1 suggestion for this journey"), from the same
string as the trigger's `aria-label` so the two cannot drift.
- **Click** opens a popover with each suggestion in full, separated by
rules, plus a footer stating that suggestions never block saving or
running.
- **Never opens on its own**, on any render.
- **No dismiss.** The chip costs no vertical space, so suppressing it
buys nothing — and a suggestion that can be waved away is one an author
never has to actually decline. A suggestion leaves when the condition
behind it is resolved.
A zero-assertion journey remains accepted with a warning; nothing here
blocks a save.
Transient banners are deliberately untouched — replay
running/passed/failed/stopped, incognito, pre-flight, recorder error.
They appear because something just happened, and a replay result that
does not announce itself is a worse product.
## Implementation
| File | |
|---|---|
| `web/src/utils/synthetics/journeySuggestions.ts` | new — pure
derivation over the steps; one small producer per rule; carries i18n
**keys** rather than text, so it needs neither Vue nor `useI18n` and a
rule is testable without mounting anything |
| `web/src/components/synthetics/journey/JourneySuggestions.vue` | new —
chip, tooltip, popover; presentation only |
| `web/src/components/synthetics/journey/BrowserJourney.vue` | computes
the suggestions, renders the chip in the toolbar, appends the offered
assertion |
| `ZeroAssertionNotice.vue`, `TestIdMisconfiguredNotice.vue` (+ specs) |
deleted — each was a visibility computation plus a card, and both halves
now have better homes |
Adding a future advisory is one producer and no template change.
Placement note: this lives in `utils/synthetics/` rather than a
composable because it holds no state and touches no reactivity — the
same split `deriveLocatorKind.ts` and `locatorStability.ts` already use
for derivations consumed by these components.
## Tests
- **17** on the derivation — both rules, empty journey, navigate-only
journey, empty candidate list, a test attribute outranked *within* a
step, both conditions at once in stable order, and that the offered
assertion is empty (`element_visible` with no selector/locator) rather
than guessed.
- **15** on the component — no chip at zero, count only and no prose,
pluralization, closed on mount, opens on click, tooltip suppressed while
open, action emits and closes, separators between suggestions.
- **5** on the `BrowserJourney` wiring — old hooks gone, suggestions
handed down, nothing offered when `readonly`, the assertion appended to
the tail with prior step order and ids intact, and the suggestion
dropping once the parent commits.
Two things the tests caught that review would not have:
1. Resolving the last suggestion unmounts the popover but not the
component holding its `open` flag — so a panel left open came *back*
open the next time a suggestion appeared. Regression test written,
confirmed failing, then fixed.
2. One component block runs against the **real** `OPopover` and `OBadge`
instead of a stub. `OBadge` declares `inheritAttrs: false` and the
popover trigger is `as-child` — precisely the pairing that silently
drops a click handler and leaves a chip that looks correct and does
nothing. Every other test stubs the popover and would not see it.
## Accessibility
`⚠ 1` has an accessible name of "1", so the trigger's `aria-label` is
load-bearing and carries the full count string. Child-mode tooltips are
pointer-only, so a keyboard user's path is that label plus the popover
they open with Enter.
Accepted trade-off, stated plainly: the old cards carried
`role="status"` and were announced on appearance. Nothing is announced
now — that announcement is what this change exists to suppress.
## Verification
- `npx vitest run src/components/synthetics src/utils/synthetics
src/views/synthetics` — 1147 passed, 58 files
- `npm run type-check` — clean
- `npm run lint` — clean for every touched file (the repo's pre-existing
`eslint.config.js` / `vitest.config.ts` findings are unchanged and
present on `main`)
Open source Datadog alternative for logs, metrics, traces, and frontend monitoring. Modern observability platform: 10x easier, 140x lower storage cost, high performance, petabyte scale.
Cloud · Documentation · Slack · Quickstart
OpenObserve (O2) is a cloud-native observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, analytics, Real User Monitoring (RUM), and AI/LLM observability. It's a cost-effective alternative to Datadog, Splunk, and Elasticsearch for teams that need full observability without the complexity or cost — with Parquet columnar storage and an S3-native design that cuts storage costs by up to 140x.
Table of Contents
- Why OpenObserve?
- Quick Start
- Product Tour
- Architecture
- Comparisons
- Production Ready
- Security & Compliance
- Enterprise Edition
- Community & Support
- Contributing
- FAQ
- License
- SBOM
Why OpenObserve?
A single platform for all of your observability signals. Here's why teams choose OpenObserve:
| Benefit | Description |
|---|---|
| 140x lower storage cost | Parquet columnar storage + S3-native architecture dramatically reduce costs vs Elasticsearch |
| Single binary deployment | Up and running in under 2 minutes — no complex cluster setup required |
| OpenTelemetry native | Built on the OpenTelemetry standard — no vendor lock-in |
| Unified platform | Logs, metrics, traces, RUM, dashboards, alerts, and incidents in one tool |
| High performance | Better query performance than Elasticsearch on a quarter of the hardware |
| SQL + PromQL | Query logs and traces with SQL, metrics with SQL or PromQL — no proprietary query language |
| Built in Rust | Memory-safe, high-performance, single binary |
Cost comparison: OpenObserve vs Elasticsearch
Quick Start
OpenObserve Cloud (fastest way)
Get started in minutes without managing infrastructure. The free tier includes up to 50 GB/day of ingestion.
🐳 Docker
docker run -d \
--name openobserve \
-v $PWD/data:/data \
-p 5080:5080 \
-e ZO_ROOT_USER_EMAIL="root@example.com" \
-e ZO_ROOT_USER_PASSWORD="Complexpass#123" \
public.ecr.aws/zinclabs/openobserve:latest
Then open http://localhost:5080 and log in with the credentials above.
For other installation methods, see the quickstart documentation. For clustered deployments, see the High Availability deployment guide.
Product Tour
OpenObserve ships with a powerful, unified web UI for every signal — logs, traces, metrics, dashboards, RUM, alerts, incidents, pipelines, and AI observability.
🏠 Unified Overview
A single home for your workspace — active incidents, service health (error rate, latency, requests), anomalies, and recent events at a glance.
📊 Logs
Centralized log management with full-text search, SQL queries, quick filters, and a visual query builder. Instantly search across all your logs, build dashboards from log data, and set up alerts — all on Parquet columnar storage for 140x lower storage cost than Elasticsearch. Read more →
🔍 Distributed Tracing
Powered by OpenTelemetry, tracing helps you follow requests across services and pinpoint performance bottlenecks. Explore the full request flow with waterfalls, flame graphs, and Gantt charts; click any span to drill into the trace. Read more →
🕸️ Service Graph
Visualize service-to-service dependencies and request flow across your system, with per-edge request counts and health-based coloring (healthy, degraded, warning, critical) to spot problem hotspots at a glance.
📈 Metrics
Explore metrics from your infrastructure and applications, then query them with SQL or PromQL. Browse thousands of metrics with faceted filters, preview them inline, combine multiple queries with formulae, and visualize the results with 19+ chart types. Read more →
📉 Dashboards
Build custom dashboards from any signal with 19+ built-in chart types and 200+ visualization variations, a drag-and-drop panel builder, template variables, and geo maps. Read more →
👀 Frontend Monitoring (RUM)
Real User Monitoring with Core Web Vitals, error tracking, performance analytics, and full session replay — so you can see exactly what your users experience. Read more →
🔔 Alerts
Get notified when something unusual happens on any signal — logs, metrics, or traces. Define thresholds, scheduled or real-time alerts, and notification channels, with alert history and anomaly detection to catch issues early. Read more →
🚨 Incidents
Correlate related alerts into incidents and track them through their lifecycle — open, acknowledged, and resolved — with severity and dimension context for faster response.
🔀 Pipelines
Enrich, redact, reduce, or normalize data at ingest time with a visual editor. Build stream-processing flows — including logs-to-metrics conversion — from source, transform (VRL functions and conditions), and destination nodes. No external tools required. Read more →
🤖 AI Observability
Monitor your GenAI and LLM applications: track cost, tokens, latency percentiles, and error rates across models, with agent graphs, session traces, and evaluation/quality scoring.
✨ O2 AI Assistant
An in-product assistant that writes your SQL, VRL, and PromQL and walks you through logs, traces, metrics, and incidents — turning natural-language questions into queries, dashboards, and alerts.
For the full feature list, see the documentation.
Architecture
OpenObserve achieves 140x lower storage costs and high performance through a modern, cloud-native architecture:
- Parquet columnar storage — efficient compression and fast analytical queries
- S3-native design — inexpensive object storage with intelligent caching
- Built in Rust — memory-safe, high-performance, single binary
- Partitioning, indexing, and smart caching — reduces search space by up to 99% for most queries
- Native multi-tenancy — organizations and streams as first-class concepts with complete data isolation
- Stateless architecture — rapid scaling and low RPO/RTO for disaster recovery
Scale & Deployment
- Thousands of concurrent users can query a single cluster simultaneously
- Single binary scales to terabytes — unique in the observability space
- High Availability mode scales to petabytes for the most demanding workloads
- Multi-region deployments with cluster federation via Super Cluster architecture (Enterprise)
- Federated search across regions and clusters (Enterprise)
High Availability & Disaster Recovery
Deploy in High Availability mode with clustering for mission-critical workloads requiring maximum uptime. OpenObserve's stateless architecture with S3-backed storage enables very low Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO): stateless nodes restart rapidly, and durability is guaranteed by S3's 99.999999999% (11 nines).
Read the architecture documentation → · Read the enterprise deployment guide →
Comparisons
OpenObserve vs Datadog
| Aspect | OpenObserve | Datadog |
|---|---|---|
| Deployment | Self-hosted or Cloud | SaaS only |
| Pricing model | Per-GB (free up to 200 GB/day) | Per-host + per-GB |
| Open source | Yes (AGPL-3.0) | No |
| OpenTelemetry | Native OTLP | Supported |
| Query language | SQL + PromQL | Proprietary |
| Vendor lock-in | None | High |
OpenObserve vs Elasticsearch
| Aspect | OpenObserve | Elasticsearch |
|---|---|---|
| Storage cost | 140x lower | High (hot/warm/cold tiers) |
| Setup complexity | Single binary | Complex cluster management |
| Query language | SQL | Lucene/KQL |
| Hardware requirements | ~1/4 the resources | High memory/CPU |
OpenObserve vs Splunk
| Aspect | OpenObserve | Splunk |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing | Open source | Expensive enterprise licensing |
| Deployment | Single binary or HA cluster | Complex |
| Query language | SQL + PromQL | SPL (proprietary) |
| Cost | Predictable, low | Unpredictable, high |
OpenObserve vs Grafana/Loki/Prometheus Stack
| Aspect | OpenObserve | Grafana Stack |
|---|---|---|
| Components | Single platform | Multiple tools (Grafana + Loki + Prometheus + Tempo) |
| Management | One binary | Multiple deployments |
| High cardinality | Full support | Loki struggles with high cardinality |
| Query performance | Fast on large volumes | Loki slow on large data |
Production Ready
OpenObserve is battle-tested in production environments worldwide:
- Thousands of active deployments across diverse industries
- Largest deployment: 2+ PB/day ingestion
- Single binary scales to terabytes — unique in the observability space
Security & Compliance
Security Features
- Secure by design with hardened container images
- Data encryption at rest and in transit
- Sensitive Data Redaction (SDR) — automatically redact sensitive data at ingestion and query time (Enterprise)
- Single Sign-On (SSO) — OIDC, OAuth, SAML, LDAP/AD integration (Enterprise)
- Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) — granular permissions (Enterprise) — Learn more →
Compliance Certifications
- ✅ SOC 2 Type II certified
- ✅ ISO 27001 certified
- ✅ GDPR compliant
- ✅ HIPAA ready (BAA available with Enterprise contracts)
OpenObserve meets the stringent security and compliance requirements of regulated industries including finance, healthcare, and government.
Enterprise Edition
OpenObserve is a true open source project. The open source edition is feature-complete and production-ready — logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, pipelines, and everything you need to run observability at scale. It will always remain actively maintained and free to use without restrictions.
For organizations that need enterprise-grade features and support, an Enterprise edition adds:
Enterprise features
- Single Sign-On (SSO) — OIDC, OAuth, SAML 2.0, LDAP/AD, and major identity providers (Okta, Azure Entra, Google, GitHub, GitLab, Keycloak)
- Advanced RBAC — granular role-based access control with custom roles — Learn more →
- Audit trails — comprehensive immutable audit logs with configurable retention
- Federated search — query across multiple clusters and regions with Super Cluster
- Sensitive Data Redaction (SDR) — automatically redact PII at ingestion and query time
- Advanced encryption — AES-256 SIV cipher keys with Google Tink KeySet and Akeyless integration
- Query & workload management (QoS) — control query resource usage and priorities in multi-tenant environments
Support & SLAs
- Dedicated support with contractual SLA guarantees and priority response times
- Technical account management, architecture review, and deployment assistance
- Migration support from existing tools, plus training and onboarding
Pricing
- Free tier: up to 50 GB/day of ingestion (~1.5 TB/month), including full commercial use (registration required at 50 GB/day)
- Volume discounts and multi-year contracts available
- View the complete feature comparison →
For enterprise inquiries and custom deployments, contact our sales team.
Community & Support
The best way to get help, share ideas, and connect with other OpenObserve users is through our community channels.
🔗 Join us on Slack
Our Slack community is the most active place for installation and configuration help, sharing best practices, discussing the roadmap, and connecting with the core team.
📱 Join the OpenObserve community on WeChat
Other ways to connect
- 💬 GitHub Discussions — longer-form discussions and Q&A
- 🐛 GitHub Issues — report bugs or request features
- 📖 Documentation — guides, tutorials, and API references
Contributing
We welcome contributions from the community! Whether you're fixing bugs, adding features, improving documentation, or sharing feedback, your help makes OpenObserve better for everyone.
To get started, read our Contributing Guide, which covers setting up your development environment, code standards, submitting pull requests, and reporting issues.
FAQ
How does OpenObserve achieve 140x lower storage costs?
Through a combination of Parquet columnar storage (efficient compression) and an S3-native architecture (inexpensive object storage). See the cost comparison chart in the Why OpenObserve? section.
What are the limitations?
All data in OpenObserve is immutable — once ingested, it cannot be modified or deleted (only entire retention periods can be dropped). This is by design and is a feature for logs and compliance use cases, ensuring data integrity and audit trails.
Is this production-ready?
Yes. OpenObserve runs in production across thousands of deployments worldwide, including environments processing in excess of 2 PB/day. See our customer stories for real-world examples.
How does query performance compare to Elasticsearch?
OpenObserve delivers better performance than Elasticsearch for most workloads, with faster search and significantly faster analytics — while using about a quarter of the hardware. The columnar Parquet format is particularly effective for complex aggregations and analytics.
Is there a steep learning curve?
No. OpenObserve is designed to be intuitive from day one:
- Familiar query languages — SQL for logs and traces, PromQL for metrics; no proprietary query language to learn
- Easy-to-use GUI — an intuitive interface with a drag-and-drop dashboard builder
- No complex tuning — unlike Elasticsearch, there are no shards, replicas, or heap sizes to manage. Just install and go.
Most users are productive within hours, not weeks.
License
Open Source Edition — licensed under AGPL-3.0. We chose AGPL to ensure that improvements to OpenObserve remain open source and benefit the entire community, while still allowing free commercial use. Why AGPL, and why it's good for the community →
Enterprise Edition — licensed under a commercial Enterprise License Agreement (not AGPL), which provides additional flexibility for enterprise deployments.
SBOM
Software Bill of Materials for OpenObserve. You can analyze either SBOM with Dependency-Track.
Rust
The SBOM is available here. To regenerate it:
cargo install cargo-cyclonedx
cargo-cyclonedx cyclonedx
JavaScript
The SBOM is available here. To regenerate it:
npm install --global @cyclonedx/cyclonedx-npm
cd web
cyclonedx-npm > sbom.json