---
title: "Deploy OpenObserve | Open Source Datadog Alternative"
description: "Self-hosted logs, metrics & traces with data in object storage"
category: "Observability"
url: https://railway.com/deploy/openobserve-object-storage
---

# Deploy OpenObserve | Open Source Datadog Alternative

Self-hosted logs, metrics & traces with data in object storage

**[Deploy OpenObserve | Open Source Datadog Alternative on Railway](https://railway.com/template/openobserve-object-storage)**

- **Creator:** katsuba.dev
- **Category:** Observability

## Template content

### OpenObserve https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/openobserve/openobserve@v0.92.0/web/src/assets/images/common/openobserve_favicon.png

- **Image:** openobserve/openobserve:v0.92.0
- **Public domain:** Yes

## Buckets

- **Storage**

## Documentation

# Deploy and Host OpenObserve on Railway

OpenObserve is an open-source observability platform for logs, metrics, traces and
front-end monitoring — a simpler, far cheaper alternative to Datadog, Splunk and
Elasticsearch, claiming roughly 140x lower storage costs thanks to a columnar,
object-storage-backed design. This template runs it the way it is meant to run in
production: a single binary with its bulk data in a managed object-storage bucket.

## About Hosting OpenObserve

This deploys OpenObserve `v0.92.0` (pinned) as one service in single-node mode, and —
unlike the other OpenObserve templates in the marketplace — points its storage backend
at a **Railway object-storage bucket** instead of a local disk. That is the whole point
of OpenObserve: the ingested parquet data and its full-text index live in the bucket
(`ZO_LOCAL_MODE_STORAGE=s3`), which is cheap and grows without bumping into a volume
size limit. A small attached volume keeps only what must be local — the SQLite metadata
(users, orgs, stream schemas, dashboards, alerts) and the transient write-ahead log.

The image is distroless, so everything is configured through `ZO_*` environment
variables — there is no start command to maintain. The admin password is generated for
you and already satisfies OpenObserve's strength policy (upper, lower, digit and a
special character), so there is nothing to fill in before deploying.

## Common Use Cases

- **Centralised logs, metrics and traces**: ship application and infrastructure
  telemetry over OTLP or the HTTP ingestion API and query it with SQL.
- **A cheaper Datadog / Elasticsearch replacement**: keep months of data in object
  storage at a fraction of the cost of an ELK stack or a SaaS bill.
- **Self-hosted APM and RUM**: traces and front-end/browser monitoring in one place.

## Dependencies for OpenObserve Hosting

### Deployment Dependencies

- The upstream `openobserve/openobserve` image — no fork, no custom build.
- A Railway object-storage bucket (provisioned by this template) for the parquet data
  and index.
- A small volume mounted at `/data` for metadata and the write-ahead log.

### Implementation Details

- `ZO_LOCAL_MODE=true` + `ZO_LOCAL_MODE_STORAGE=s3`: single node, data in the bucket.
- The bucket credentials are wired automatically via `${{ Storage.* }}` references.
- `PORT` and `ZO_HTTP_PORT` are both `5080`; the public domain is created for you.
- `ZO_TELEMETRY=false` — no anonymous phone-home.
- Log in with `ZO_ROOT_USER_EMAIL` (default `admin@example.com`) and the generated
  `ZO_ROOT_USER_PASSWORD` (see the service variables after deploy).

## Why Deploy OpenObserve on Railway?

Railway provisions the compute, the object-storage bucket and the public domain together,
so the production-shaped deployment — the one that actually keeps storage costs low —
comes up on the first deploy with nothing to wire by hand. Expect roughly 400–700 MB of
RAM at idle for a single-node instance; cost scales with how much telemetry you ingest and
retain, and because the bulk of that lives in object storage rather than on a fixed-size
disk, you are not forced to resize a volume as your data grows.


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- [SigOnly](https://railway.com/deploy/sigonly) — Deploy SigNoz with a working demo app & config in one click
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