An observability tool is useful when it helps explain a real failure. SigNoz ingests OpenTelemetry traces, logs, and metrics, but a dashboard with sample data does not prove your service is instrumented correctly.
Send a staging request through the same services as production. Verify a trace, its correlated logs, and a relevant latency/error metric in SigNoz. Trigger a controlled failure and time how long it takes to identify the responsible span. Inspect attributes for accidental personal data, token leakage, or high-cardinality values; these affect privacy and cost.
Measure ingestion volume, retention, alert noise, and storage after a realistic load. Test backup or export of configuration and a collector outage. Compare alternatives using the same instrumentation and incident task. The winner is the tool that shortens diagnosis without creating a new reliability burden.
Akousa