Every engineering team eventually faces the same challenge: “How do we actually see what’s happening inside our system?” Logs tell one story, metrics tell another, and traces often live in their own world. When something breaks, you’re forced to bounce between tools, hoping the dots connect.

That’s why dash0 exists. Instead of being just another monitoring tool, dash0 brings logs, metrics, and traces together into one fast, OpenTelemetry-native platform. It’s designed to make observability simpler, cheaper, and more effective for developers, SREs, and platform engineers.

What is Dash0?

Dash0 is an observability platform built on the principle of openness. It’s powered by OpenTelemetry (OTel), which means your telemetry data stays portable and standards-compliant. No vendor lock-in. No hidden conversions. Just clean, usable data.

With dash0, teams can monitor distributed systems, troubleshoot faster, and understand how services interact—all from a single place.

Why Dash0 is Different

  • True OTel-Native: Unlike competitors, dash0 doesn’t reformat your data.

  • Cost Transparency: Pricing is based only on the telemetry volume you send.

  • Engineered for Speed: Built on ClickHouse for lightning-fast queries.

  • Developer-Friendly: Intuitive design, no unnecessary complexity.

Core Features of Dash0

Metrics That Matter

Get reliable SLIs with long-term retention and instant querying.

Distributed Tracing

See how requests move across services to spot bottlenecks.

Logs in Context

Logs tie directly to metrics and traces, so you never lose the bigger picture.

Dashboards & Service Maps

Understand dependencies at a glance with visual service maps.

Proactive Alerts

Stay ahead of issues with alerts and synthetic monitoring.

Config-as-Code

Manage observability as part of your infrastructure using Git.

How Dash0 Works Behind the Scenes

The backbone of dash0 is ClickHouse, a high-performance database that handles massive amounts of telemetry data. That means even high-cardinality queries—like drilling down by namespace or error type—remain fast.

Pair this with OpenTelemetry pipelines, and you get observability that’s open, powerful, and scalable.

Who Can Benefit from Dash0?

  • Developers: Debug issues in production without juggling multiple tools.

  • SREs: Cut downtime and mean time to recovery (MTTR).

  • Platform Engineers: Gain Kubernetes visibility without extra complexity.

  • Scaling Teams: Add observability without unpredictable bills.

Dash0’s Transparent Pricing Model

Most observability vendors use confusing pricing models—per host, per seat, per query. That makes budgets unpredictable.

Dash0 does it differently: you pay only for the telemetry you send. Plus, built-in dashboards let you track usage by service, team, or namespace, so you stay in control of costs.

Dash0 vs Other Observability Platforms

Dash0 vs Datadog

Datadog is feature-packed but expensive. Dash0 focuses on essentials with predictable pricing.

Dash0 vs New Relic

New Relic reformats telemetry into proprietary formats. Dash0 keeps everything open.

Dash0 vs Prometheus + Grafana

Prometheus and Grafana require heavy setup and maintenance. Dash0 works out of the box.

Common Use Cases for Dash0

  • Debugging failing microservices with traces tied to logs.

  • Monitoring Kubernetes clusters with minimal setup.

  • Tracking telemetry usage to control costs.

  • Improving incident response with connected observability data.

A Day with Dash0: From Outage to Fix

Imagine this: your checkout service starts failing at peak traffic. With dash0, you see error spikes in metrics. You follow a trace that reveals which microservice is misbehaving. One click takes you to logs connected to that trace, and you uncover a database misconfiguration. Instead of hours, it takes minutes to fix.

Best Practices for Dash0

  • Use consistent naming and labeling in telemetry data.

  • Apply sampling for high-volume traces.

  • Monitor usage dashboards weekly to keep costs optimized.

  • Keep alert and dashboard configs in version control.

The Future of Observability with Dash0

The future of observability is open, fast, and transparent. With OpenTelemetry as its foundation, dash0 is leading the way by giving teams freedom and flexibility. Instead of locking you into proprietary systems, it empowers you to take full control of your observability pipeline.

Conclusion

Dash0 is more than just a monitoring tool—it’s a modern solution to an old problem. By unifying logs, metrics, and traces, it helps teams debug faster, stay on top of performance, and keep costs under control. If your current observability setup feels like a burden, it might be time to make the switch to dash0.

FAQS

Q1: What is dash0 used for?
Dash0 is used to unify logs, metrics, and traces into one observability platform.

Q2: Who should use dash0?
Developers, SREs, and platform engineers benefit most from dash0.

Q3: How is dash0 priced?
Dash0 uses a simple volume-based pricing model.

Q4: Does dash0 work with Kubernetes?
Yes, dash0 gives deep visibility into Kubernetes workloads and namespaces.

Q5: How does dash0 compare to Datadog?
Dash0 is leaner, more affordable, and fully OTel-native, while Datadog is pricier and more complex.