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shipped· 5 months

trace.dev

Distributed tracing for indie hackers

GoClickHouseNext.jsOpenTelemetry
Live demo Source

Why I built this

Jaeger and Tempo are great at scale but painful for solo developers. I wanted Datadog-quality DX in a single docker run.

The problem

Observability tooling assumes you have an SRE team.

target users: Indie devs and small teams.

Core features

  • OTLP ingest
  • Flame graph viewer
  • Trace search by attribute
  • Sampling rules

Technical challenges

  • Keeping ClickHouse memory bounded on a 2GB VPS

Engineering decisions

Why ClickHouse

Trace data is append-mostly and aggregation-heavy. ClickHouse's columnar storage made the math work on cheap hardware.

Lessons learned

  • You can fit a surprising amount of telemetry in ClickHouse if you accept lower cardinality on attributes.