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Overcast

VerifiedOpen sourceFeatured

Observability a two-person team can afford to run and actually understand

Launched Week 32, 202641k viewsOpen source
1.1kVisit site
Overcast interface — main workspace
  • Overcast interface — detail view
  • Overcast interface — settings

About Overcast

Overcast is metrics, logs and traces for small teams, priced and designed for engineers who are also the on-call rotation. One binary, one Postgres database, and alert rules you can read out loud. No sampling surprises, no per-host pricing, no bill that outgrows your infrastructure.

Features

  • One binary

    Metrics, logs and traces from a single process backed by Postgres and S3-compatible storage.

  • Readable alert rules

    Rules are written the way you would say them, and they diff cleanly in code review.

  • No silent sampling

    Overcast never quietly drops data. Budget overruns are loud and configurable.

  • OpenTelemetry native

    Standard OTLP ingest. Your instrumentation is portable on day one and on the day you leave.

  • Correlated by default

    Jump from an alert to the trace to the exact log line without changing tools.

  • Self-host the real build

    The open-source build is the production build. No feature-gated community edition.

The story

1 min read

Built for the team that is also the on-call rotation

Observability vendors design for a buyer who has a platform team. If that is not you, you get one of two outcomes: a free tier that expires exactly when it becomes useful, or a bill that dwarfs the infrastructure it is watching.

Overcast is built for the middle.

What you get

  • Metrics, logs and traces in one place, correlated by trace ID, with no separate products to wire together.
  • Alert rules in plain language. error rate above 2% for 5 minutes is the actual rule syntax.
  • Predictable pricing. Priced on ingested gigabytes, not hosts, containers, seats or custom metrics.
  • Self-host or hosted. The self-hosted build is the same build, not a crippled community edition.

The operational bet

Overcast runs as a single binary against Postgres and object storage. That is a deliberate ceiling: it will not scale to a hundred terabytes a day, and it is not trying to. In exchange, one person can operate it, upgrade it, and reason about it during an incident.

If you outgrow it, the data is in open formats and the exporters are OpenTelemetry-standard. Leaving is a migration, not a hostage negotiation.

On sampling

Overcast does not silently sample. If you exceed your ingest budget it tells you and drops from the lowest-priority stream you configured. The failure mode of "your traces are incomplete and nobody told you" is worse than the failure mode of a loud warning.

Pricing

Apache 2.0. Hosted plans start at $29/month.

Self-hosted

Free

  • Apache 2.0 licence
  • All features
  • Community support
  • Unlimited everything
Popular

Hosted

$29/month

  • 50 GB ingest included
  • Managed upgrades
  • 30-day retention
  • Email support

Hosted Pro

$99/month

  • 250 GB ingest included
  • 90-day retention
  • SSO and audit log
  • Priority support

Changelog

  1. v1.9

    Exemplars land

    Metrics now carry trace exemplars, so a spike on a latency graph is one click from the slow trace that caused it.

  2. v1.8

    Postgres 17 and partition pruning

    Retention drops are now partition-level rather than row-level deletes. Retention enforcement went from minutes to milliseconds.

Frequently asked questions

Is Overcast really open source?

Yes, Apache 2.0, and the self-hosted build is the same artefact we run in our hosted product. There is no separate enterprise binary with the useful features in it.

How does pricing work?

Hosted plans are priced on ingested gigabytes per month, starting at $29. There is no per-host, per-container, per-seat or per-custom-metric charge, which is where observability bills usually detonate.

What scale does it handle?

Comfortably into the low terabytes per day on a single node. Past that you should be looking at a purpose-built columnar backend, and we will tell you so rather than sell you an upgrade.

Can I migrate off it later?

Ingest is standard OTLP and stored data exports to Parquet. Both directions are documented, because a tool you cannot leave is a tool you should not adopt.

Does it replace my existing metrics stack?

It can, but most teams start by pointing a single service at it and running side by side for a few weeks. The OTLP endpoint makes that a config change rather than a rewrite.

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Overcast compared

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