Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#1

Post by 3D39739091 » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 4:48 PM UTC

If you are using self-hosted open source to handle to handle your logs, traces, metrics instead of a third party SaSS or all in one platform, what do you use? How is it working out for you?

Inspired by a related thread about vendor lock in.

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#2

Post by uaas » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 5:31 PM UTC

Good ol’ Prometheus and Grafana stack (Loki for logs, Tempo for traces) is perfect for smaller projects. You can also explore having OpenTelemetry collectors in the middle for more sophisticated processing and if you want to keep an eye on its ecosystem.

This is still the goto OSS stack, and I wouldn’t really recommend looking into smaller projects (usually backed by a single vendor) that are claiming better performance/lower resource usage for the same capabilities, because that always comes with a cost.

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#3

Post by Fizzadar » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 7:08 PM UTC

Victoriametrics for metrics (7x ram reduction vs prom), Loki for logs but evaluating Victorialogs. Then grafana for ui. Cannot recommend vm enough, it’s fantastic.

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#4

Post by bitbasher » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 7:18 PM UTC

logrotate, systemd, `journalctl -u server-name | grep whatever`

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#5

Post by herbst » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 7:45 PM UTC

Shynet is a good very light visitor tracking system for websites. Super simple.

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#6

Post by mdaniel » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 10:28 PM UTC

bitbasher wrote: post #4

logrotate, systemd, `journalctl -u server-name | grep whatever`

This answer skips over how you gain access to the machine. I'm guessing you're a solo dev shop, but still

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#7

Post by cpburns2009 » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 11:16 PM UTC

Logs: log files, logrotate and grep.

Metrics: Prometheus, Grafana and prometheus-client (Python library for Prometheus expoters).

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#8

Post by bitbasher » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 11:34 PM UTC

mdaniel wrote: post #6

bitbasher wrote: post #4

logrotate, systemd, `journalctl -u server-name | grep whatever`

This answer skips over how you gain access to the machine. I'm guessing you're a solo dev shop, but still

`ssh`, and yes I am solo.

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#9

Post by baobun » Sat, Jun 07, 2025, 11:54 PM UTC

For metrics and monitoring, can highly recommend victoria-metrics + vmagent + vmalert + prometheus-node-exporter. Rock solid, lean and performant. Documentation isn't all there and some of the debian packages aren't stellar (so you may want to build your own, which is ezpz) but IME it's a reliable stack.

They do integrate with Grafana much like Prometheus but we are not happy with Grafana[0] and recommendations for something low-maintenance we can drop in to the above stack instead would be awesome.

[0]: Why? Managing dashboards/plugins in an airgapped IaC setting is like pulling teeth at every other turn. Then at one point supposedly we had the container version pinned (by tag not sha, lesson learned) but yet at some point an image update from Docker Hub broke most of our dashboard/data-source links so now those dashboards are broken and I'd rather try something new before I recommit to Grafana.

Re: Ask HN: What's your open source stack?

#10

Post by rootnod3 » Sun, Jun 08, 2025, 7:05 AM UTC

I use mostly snmp with LibreNMS. Makes for a good standard way of getting most metrics I care about.