OpenObserve Review: Pricing, LLM Observability, Pros & Cons

OpenObserve is an open-source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces, real user monitoring, and LLM applications, built by OpenObserve Inc. in Menlo Park. The core is written in Rust, stores telemetry as columnar Parquet with no index, and is licensed under AGPL-3.0, with a managed cloud and self-hosted editions.

LLM observability runs on OpenTelemetry. Traces capture the model, token counts, latency, and cost of each call, with integrations for the major providers, agent frameworks, and gateways like LiteLLM, Portkey, and OpenRouter. Online evaluations score live traces with an LLM judge or a remote scorer, and experiments run datasets through scorers offline, much like dedicated LLM evaluation tools, though both are enterprise features.

Pricing is per GB rather than per host or seat: Cloud charges $0.50 per GB ingested and $0.01 per GB queried with unlimited users, and the Self-Hosted Enterprise edition is free up to 50 GB a day. As a general observability platform, OpenObserve doesn't include an LLM gateway or prompt management, so routing and prompt versions stay in separate tools.