How SigNoz grew to 12k GitHub stars with Pranay Prateek
SigNoz cofounder Pranay Prateek explains how an open-source observability product reached 10,000 GitHub stars, why the depth of community questions matters more than raw attention, and how a five-minute local setup becomes the first step toward an enterprise sale.
Pranay Prateek is a cofounder of SigNoz, an open-source observability platform that brings traces, logs and metrics into one place.
Two years after launch, the project had 10,000 GitHub stars, more than 2,000 Slack members and over 100 contributors. Pranay describes the product problem, the community signals behind that traction and the path from one developer experimenting locally to a company paying for hosting or enterprise controls.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
What problem led you to build SigNoz?
At my previous company, Prometheus and Elastic did not give the team a dependable way to find the root cause of incidents across microservices. Engineers entered a war-room process and inspected separate signals while each minute of failure hurt revenue and customers. Observability should let them ask why an API is slow, follow the request across services and narrow ten possible causes to the two worth investigating.
Could observability become useful to product managers too?
Developers and DevOps engineers are the primary users, but product outcomes and software health are connected. A falling conversion rate may come from a slow or erroring service. If the interface makes infrastructure understandable, a product manager could connect the funnel they own to those engineering signals instead of treating product and operational metrics as unrelated systems.
Why build the product as open source?
Developers are tinkerers. They want to run a tool, inspect it and ask a community before committing to a formal sales process. Existing open-source tools handled individual signals, but there was room for a unified experience resembling Datadog. A Hacker News launch with more than 200 upvotes provided early validation, and YC supplied feedback from other founders before the team expanded through technical content and developer communities.
How do you measure meaningful community engagement?
The depth of a question is more informative than its existence. Early questions were about installation; better documentation moved them toward connecting traces and logs in real production environments. Pull requests, answers and documentation improvements show someone is using the product deeply enough to find an edge and repair it. Those contributions also remove the same obstacle for the next developer.
What is the business model behind the open-source project?
The core remains free and open source. Larger companies can pay for enterprise needs such as advanced security, compliance and role-based controls while running it in their own cloud. Teams without the operational capacity to host observability can instead use the managed service, send SigNoz their telemetry and let the company handle scaling and infrastructure.
How does a community user become a customer?
A developer usually starts on a laptop, instruments more services and then introduces the tool to a team. If it solves the problem, that person becomes an internal champion and expands usage. Organization-wide production deployment brings in leadership and a need for support or accountability. The commercial conversation therefore follows confidence built through progressively deeper real use.
What accelerates that path into a team?
Remove friction from the first local attempt. We moved away from a datastore with heavier infrastructure requirements and invested in Docker Compose, Helm and other straightforward installation paths. Then shorten the time until the user sees their own telemetry in the interface. Installation and visible data are the two early milestones: once both happen quickly, the developer has enough confidence to explore and advocate for wider adoption.
What should founders understand before open-sourcing a DevTool?
Ask why open source serves this audience and product. Publishing code does not remove the obligation to talk to users and make an excellent experience. It can accelerate feedback, contribution and evidence of community interest, especially when developers are the end users, but it is one angle of the strategy rather than a mechanism that solves product, distribution and monetization by itself.