# Uptrace

**Source:** https://geo.sig.ai/brands/uptrace  
**Vertical:** Developer Tools  
**Subcategory:** Distributed Tracing  
**Tier:** Emerging  
**Website:** uptrace.dev  
**Last Updated:** 2026-04-14

## Summary

Uptrace is an open-source distributed tracing and APM platform based on OpenTelemetry for monitoring application performance and diagnosing bottlenecks.

## Company Overview

Uptrace is an open-source application performance monitoring and distributed tracing platform built natively on OpenTelemetry, the emerging industry standard for vendor-neutral observability instrumentation. The platform ingests traces, metrics, and logs through the OpenTelemetry protocol, allowing teams to instrument their applications once with the OpenTelemetry SDK and send data to Uptrace without vendor lock-in from proprietary agents. This OpenTelemetry-first architecture positions Uptrace as a migration destination for organizations that have already adopted OpenTelemetry instrumentation but want more control over where their telemetry data is stored and processed.

The platform provides distributed trace visualization with flame graphs and waterfall views that allow engineers to identify latency contributors and error sources across service boundaries in microservices architectures. Metrics collection and dashboarding complement the tracing layer, enabling correlation between aggregate service health indicators and individual trace-level detail. Uptrace can be self-hosted on any infrastructure using Docker or Kubernetes, giving teams complete data ownership and the ability to run observability infrastructure inside their own network perimeter — a requirement for organizations with strict data residency, compliance, or security constraints.

Uptrace targets backend engineering teams and platform teams that want APM and distributed tracing capabilities without the cost of commercial platforms like Datadog or New Relic, and with more control than fully managed open-source offerings. The open-source model drives adoption among cost-conscious engineering teams and those building in regulated industries where cloud-hosted SaaS observability tools are not viable. Uptrace competes with Jaeger, Zipkin, and SigNoz in the self-hosted tracing space, differentiating through its integrated metrics and logging support and its modern user interface built for day-to-day developer workflows rather than one-off debugging sessions.

## Frequently Asked Questions

### Does Uptrace require replacing existing instrumentation to use OpenTelemetry?
If your services are already instrumented with OpenTelemetry SDKs, you can point the OpenTelemetry Collector at Uptrace without changing application code. For services using proprietary agents, you would need to migrate instrumentation to the OpenTelemetry SDK.

### What is Uptrace?
Uptrace is an open-source APM and distributed tracing platform built natively on OpenTelemetry, allowing teams to send traces, metrics, and logs from OpenTelemetry-instrumented services without vendor lock-in from proprietary observability agents.

### Is Uptrace open source?
Yes. Uptrace is open-source and self-hostable via Docker or Kubernetes, making it a cost-effective alternative to commercial observability platforms like Datadog or New Relic for teams that have already adopted OpenTelemetry instrumentation.

### What does Uptrace provide for distributed tracing?
Uptrace provides distributed trace visualization with flame graphs and waterfall views for analyzing request latency across service boundaries, span filtering and search, error tracking, and P50/P95/P99 latency percentile metrics per service and endpoint.

### How does Uptrace compare to Jaeger for distributed tracing?
Both are OpenTelemetry-native tracing backends. Uptrace extends beyond traces to include metrics and logs in a single platform, provides a more polished UI, and includes alerting — making it a broader observability platform compared to Jaeger's focus on distributed tracing visualization.

### Does Uptrace support metrics and logs alongside traces?
Yes. Uptrace ingests OpenTelemetry metrics and logs alongside traces, allowing teams to correlate trace data with infrastructure metrics and application logs in a single platform without maintaining separate systems for each signal type.

### What database does Uptrace use for storage?
Uptrace uses ClickHouse as its storage backend — a columnar database optimized for high-throughput analytics queries that makes trace search and aggregation fast even over large data volumes, which is why Uptrace can self-host at significant scale without the cost of managed cloud storage.

### Does Uptrace support alerting?
Yes. Uptrace supports alert rules based on metrics thresholds, error rates, or trace anomalies, with notification integrations for PagerDuty, Slack, and webhook endpoints for routing alerts to existing on-call workflows.

## Tags

developer-tools, saas, b2b, startup, platform, infrastructure, open-source, analytics

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*Data from geo.sig.ai Brand Intelligence Database. Updated 2026-04-14.*