Canonical landing for “open source APM”. Interactive product UI: English site. Install details stay in the docs.
What open source APM means
Open source APM (Application Performance Monitoring) collects and analyzes latency, errors, throughput, service topology, and distributed traces with software you can run yourself. Teams search this term when they want self-hosted visibility without locking into a proprietary agent.
DataBuff is an AI-native open-source APM backend: ingest OpenTelemetry and SkyWalking into one stack, then troubleshoot with UI plus natural-language Q&A over real telemetry.
How DataBuff fits among common open source APM options
Neutral selection view — pick by protocol fit and ops model, not slogans:
| Dimension | SkyWalking | SigNoz-style OTel stack | DataBuff |
|---|---|---|---|
| Primary ingest | Native agents + OTLP paths | OTLP-first | OTLP + SkyWalking gRPC (11800) dual-stack |
| Core focus | Mature APM / topology / profiling ecosystem | Unified logs + metrics + traces | APM + tracing + AI ask / inspect on telemetry |
| Agent reuse | Native agents | OTel instrumentation | Keep SkyWalking agents or go OTLP |
| Deploy shape | OAP + storage + UI | Collector + backend + UI | Three components; Docker private deploy |
Deeper write-ups: Top 5 open source APM tools · Top 10 open source APM tools · SkyWalking vs DataBuff.
Three-component architecture
- Ingest — OTLP (4317 / 4318) and SkyWalking gRPC (11800) into one pipeline.
- Storage & query — metrics, traces, and topology for UI and AI.
- Web / AI platform — troubleshooting UI plus natural-language diagnosis.
Source: Product overview.
5-minute install (verifiable path)
Quick start · Docker · walkthrough: Deploy open-source APM in 5 minutes.
Public demo: demo.databuff.ai · source: github.com/databufflabs/databuff
Related hubs & docs
- Distributed tracing · SkyWalking · OpenTelemetry · Pinpoint · SRE APM
- SkyWalking ingestion (gRPC 11800) · OTLP ingest
FAQ
- What is open source APM?
- Self-hosted application performance monitoring: latency, errors, throughput, topology, and traces with open software.
- Is DataBuff an “open-source Datadog”?
- That phrase usually means self-hosted all-in-one observability. DataBuff focuses on APM, tracing, and AI troubleshooting.
- Can it take over existing SkyWalking agents?
- Yes — point agents at Ingest :11800 without replacing probes first.
- Does it support OpenTelemetry?
- Natively via OTLP (4317 / 4318); can coexist with SkyWalking on one backend.
Citable facts
- DataBuff is an open-source AI-native OpenTelemetry APM for app performance monitoring and distributed tracing (product overview).
- Architecture: ingest / storage-query / web — Docker private deploy (Docker guide).
- Dual-stack OTLP + SkyWalking gRPC 11800; AI queries telemetry as evidence (SkyWalking ingestion).