Observatory is an open-source observability system for engineers running production infrastructure. It ingests metrics, structured logs, and distributed traces; stores them at full resolution; and exposes them through a SQL-flavored query layer. Apache 2.0. One binary. No telemetry. No license server. No sales call required to download it.
The system was written by three engineers in Berlin, Toronto, and Mexico City who got tired of paying for cardinality the vendor would not show them. Observatory is what those engineers wanted to use, written in public so other people could use it too. It is intentionally not pretty. The aesthetic of this page reflects the aesthetic of the project: information first, design last.
Who it is for. You run production. You read queries faster than you click wizards. You have at least one opinion about percentiles. You would rather understand the shape of your traffic than be sold a dashboard your VP can screenshot. If that is you, the install command is at the bottom of this section.
Who it is not for. Anyone looking for a managed service with a dedicated success engineer. Anyone who wants the dashboards to be colorful and the alerts to be automated by AI. Anyone who needs procurement to approve a purchase order. We are not the tool. We will happily point you at one that is.
Install. brew install observatory on macOS or Linux. observatory serve --dev to start a local single-node deployment on port 4318. The README on the source repository has the rest. There is no rest.
Specifications.
| Release | v0.4.2 (public preview, 2026-04-29) |
|---|---|
| License | Apache License 2.0 |
| Architecture | Single-binary. Append-only columnar store. Parquet shards. |
| Runtime | x86_64 Linux, ARM64 Linux, Apple Silicon macOS |
| Storage | Local disk. S3-compatible object store optional. |
| Ingest | OpenTelemetry over gRPC and HTTP, port 4318 |
| Query | SQL-flavored, port 4319 |
| UI | Optional, port 4320, plain HTML |
| Telemetry | None. The binary makes no outbound calls. |
| Source | github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills |
Recent activity.
| SHA | Author | Date | Message |
|---|---|---|---|
| a3f1c9d | anika | 2026-04-29 14:21 | query: pushdown of histogram aggregations into columnar layer |
| b22f0e1 | diego | 2026-04-28 22:08 | ingest: tighter batching for high-cardinality label sets |
| c918aa3 | morgan | 2026-04-27 09:44 | compactor: per-tenant disk quota enforcement |
| d40113b | anika | 2026-04-25 11:02 | docs: clarify --explain flag in the query CLI |
| e7c2940 | diego | 2026-04-23 17:36 | wire format: freeze v1 of the trace protocol |
Full git log available in the source repository. We do not rebase main.
A note on the aesthetic. This page is deliberately ugly. The web has been over-designed for fifteen years. The information density of the typical SaaS landing page has trended toward zero in proportion to the visual noise. Observatory is interested in the opposite trend. We have included no images on this page. There is one font. There are no rounded corners. There is no marketing copy in the cosmetic sense. We assume you can read.
