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by cyberax 269 days ago
I've been using Uptrace in our docker-compose local setup. It runs just fine on a MacBook Air, and has support for tracing, metrics, and logs.

The UI is predictably an annoying mess, but that's the case with EVERY tracing solution I've tried. Very much including SigNoz.
1 comments
pranay01 268 days ago
SigNoz maintainer here. Curious, when did you try SigNoz (which version/which timeframe) and any specific feedback on what you don't like about it's tracing UI? Would be helpful for us to understand areas to improve on
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cyberax 268 days ago
Sigh. I have _plenty_ of gripes that would be easy to fix. My first "sniff test" for observability platforms is a tool to quickly jump to a given trace/span by ID. You don't have it. Uptrace has it.

Another issue is the complexity of switching between filtered views. A very useful primitive that you and Uptrace are missing: "show this event within the surrounding context". CloudWatch has it.

The other main overarching issue is ease of navigation and switching between contexts. You are actually somewhat better than Uptrace because I can actually cut&paste URLs on most of the pages and send them to my colleague over Slack.

But you make up for that by having bad search in traces (e.g. I can't just search all the traces with the word "UploadDoc" somewhere in them). Here's how Uptrace works: https://imgur.com/a/UWSdIEt

Your "Trace View" is ridiculous: I can't resize columns, I can't drag them to change the order, I can't even _show_ additional columns even though I can sort by them: https://www.loom.com/share/d5fa401384d94959978c0bb2be9010a5?...

Then you also are freaking annoying with the UI. I don't even care about everything getting extra-bloated. It's just par for the course for the modern UI vibe-based design.

But I get almost physically sick from these ridiculous popups: https://www.loom.com/share/21f5efdae8b84b12ba09c45cd2fa0855?...

Honestly, I think that most observability stacks (very much including SigNoz) are focusing on looking hip with cool dashboards. They totally suck when I need to dig deep into logs to find what happened.

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pranay01 265 days ago
thanks for the detailed note

> My first "sniff test" for observability platforms is a tool to quickly jump to a given trace/span by ID.

You should be able to do this in SigNoz https://www.loom.com/share/71a2a95b76584b3983d9eeebb60ac420?...

> "show this event within the surrounding context"

we have this in the context logs. does this solve your use case or you mean something else? https://www.loom.com/share/9039afd5c4bf45e7b357a22c9943bb32?...

>But you make up for that by having bad search in traces

Did you mean for this to search across all attributes in spans or when you know which attribute you want to search in? If later, than you can do this through our query builder even today.

Your feedback on "Trace View" is fair. We are planning some improvements on that

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