Observa — Self-Hosted Observability Platform
Observa is an open-source, self-hosted observability and analytics platform for product and engineering teams — tracking frontend users, backend requests, errors, sessions, custom events, background jobs, webhooks, and API uptime in a single dashboard.
Features
- Organization and project management with public/secret API keys per project
- SDK-facing ingestion endpoints for events, errors, requests, sessions, jobs, and webhooks
- Dashboard APIs for overview metrics, error lists, API request logs, sessions, and user timelines
- API uptime monitoring with stored historical checks
- Alert rules for error thresholds, monitor downtime, slow endpoints, and failed jobs/webhooks
- Minimal JavaScript and Python SDKs for easy integration into other apps
Tech Stack
- Backend: FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, Alembic, PostgreSQL
- Frontend: Next.js, React, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS
- Auth: JWT for the dashboard, scoped API keys for ingestion
- Infra: Docker Compose, Redis-ready queue/realtime hooks
What I Learned
- Designing ingestion APIs that need to handle high write volume from many SDKs at once
- Structuring a FastAPI backend with clear API/service/repository layering
- Building SDKs simple enough for other developers to drop into their own apps