Your logs, metrics, and traces — in one honest pane.
backwork unifies logs, metrics, distributed traces, requests, incidents and alerts into a single self-hosted dashboard. Multi-tenant, OpenTelemetry-native, and engineered to never show you green when your pipeline is down.
Open source One Docker command No credit card
Built on the open standards you already trust
Observability shouldn't cost more than the thing you're observing.
Per-GB pricing punishes you for having traffic. Five separate tools never agree. And too many dashboards quietly show green when the data behind them stopped flowing. backwork is the opposite: one stack you run yourself, one pane that tells the truth.
Everything you need to watch a system.
Logs, metrics and traces share one timeline, one search and one set of alerts — no tab-juggling.
Logs
Every line, searchable.Full-text and LogQL search across every container, with level, service and time filters and a live volume chart.
Metrics
Host to container to app.node-exporter and cAdvisor metrics plus RED rates from real traces — PromQL underneath.
Traces
Follow every request.OpenTelemetry-native spans with a waterfall and a dependency map.
Requests
RED, at a glance.A flat HTTP feed that jumps straight to the trace.
Incidents
It tells you first.Crash, OOM, restart-loop and error-spike detection from real signals.
Alerts
Routed where you'll see them.Rules to Slack, Discord, webhook, email or SMS — with a no-data state so an outage never fakes “all clear.”
Built different, on purpose.
Four decisions that set it apart from the per-gigabyte status quo.
Own your data
Self-hosted on your own box with one Docker command. Your telemetry never leaves your infrastructure — no per-GB bill, no third-party retention.
Multi-tenant, SaaS-ready
Organizations, teams, roles and per-project ingest tokens. Every tenant's logs, metrics and traces are isolated to the byte.
Honest by design
No demo data, no fake green. A data-source outage reads as “no data,” never “healthy” — so you trust the dashboard when it matters.
One command to ship
curl | sh drops an agent on any host for logs and metrics. Point any OpenTelemetry SDK at one endpoint for traces. That's it.
Live in three steps.
Create a project
Spin up an organization and get a per-project ingest token, scoped to your tenant.
# in the dashboard Projects → New project
Ship your telemetry
One command for logs & metrics on any host. One env var for OpenTelemetry traces.
curl -fsSL backwork.dev/install.sh | shWatch it live
A unified dashboard that auto-refreshes, detects incidents and routes alerts where you'll see them.
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=/otlpIt never shows you green when your pipeline is down.
Most tools coerce a missing metric to zero and paint it healthy. backwork distinguishes no data from all clear — across overview, incidents and alerts — so an outage in the telemetry path is visible, not hidden.
Free to self-host. Pay only for convenience.
Run the whole thing yourself at no cost, or let us host and scale it for you.
Questions, answered.
Everything worth knowing before you deploy.
Is backwork open source?+
Yes. The full stack lives in a public repo — clone it and run it yourself for free, forever.
Is it really self-hosted?+
Yes. backwork runs on your own host via Docker Compose, and your telemetry stays on your infrastructure.
Does it work with OpenTelemetry?+
Natively. Point any OTLP exporter at a single endpoint and your traces, requests and APM metrics appear automatically.
What's it built on?+
Battle-tested open standards — Loki for logs, VictoriaMetrics for metrics, Jaeger for traces and Vector for collection — unified behind one dashboard.
Can my whole team use it?+
Yes. Create organizations and teams, assign roles, and issue per-project ingest tokens that keep each tenant's data isolated.
How is it different from Grafana or Datadog?+
One integrated pane instead of a wall of dashboards, self-hosted economics instead of per-GB pricing, and states you can trust — it never shows green when your pipeline is down.
Stop renting your observability.
Deploy backwork on your own host in minutes and own your telemetry end to end.