After building an observability software (Instana) and selling it to IBM, I wanted to approach observability differently this time—simpler, more open, and built with developers like me in mind. That’s why I started Dash0.
Dash0 is natively built on OpenTelemetry, so logs, metrics, and traces are handled without extra hoops. You can send data via OTLP directly, through an OpenTelemetry Collector, or use our open-source Kubernetes operator to get started quickly.
I didn’t want a tool that forces people into proprietary systems, so Dash0 supports PromQL for querying and alerting and Perses for dashboards. If you’ve already got queries or alerts from Prometheus, you can reuse them with Dash0 without any friction. We went the extra mile, exposing logging and tracing data to PromQL, too, in a way that feels native.
One thing I always found frustrating about other tools was the need for more context. Dash0 leverages OpenTelemetry’s semantic conventions to tie all signals together. It correlates logs, metrics, and traces around the resource concept, which makes it easier to filter, search, and navigate between dependencies.
On the user experience side, I focused on making it developer- and SRE-friendly. Everything has full keyboard support, quick filtering with previews and guidance, and APIs that help you get answers fast, not just clicks and dashboards. I wanted something that feels snappy and productive, not clunky and unwieldy.
Dash0 is still in its early days, but it’s a tool I would have wanted myself—an open platform that rejects lock-in and works with the tools and open standards we already use in the cloud-native community.
I’d love to hear your feedback, suggestions, or thoughts on observability in general.
