# Frequently Asked Questions

> Answers to common questions about OpenObserve: pricing, deployment options, data retention, migration, and support for logs, metrics, traces, and RUM.

Source: https://openobserve.ai/faqs/

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Find answers to common questions about OpenObserve, the modern observability platform designed for today's applications.

## General

### What is OpenObserve?

OpenObserve is a cloud-native observability platform designed for logs, metrics, and traces. It's built to be highly efficient, cost-effective, and scalable for modern applications and infrastructure.

### How does OpenObserve compare to other observability platforms?

OpenObserve offers similar functionality to platforms like Elasticsearch and Grafana Loki but with significantly lower resource requirements. It's designed to be 10x more resource-efficient, which translates to lower infrastructure costs and simpler operations.

### Is OpenObserve open source?

Yes, OpenObserve is open source and available under the AGPL license. You can find the source code on GitHub and contribute to the project.

### Can I self-host OpenObserve?

OpenObserve can be self-hosted on your own infrastructure. We provide documentation and support for deploying on Kubernetes, Docker, and other environments.

## Technical

### What programming languages and technologies does OpenObserve use?

OpenObserve is primarily built with Rust for the backend services, which provides excellent performance and memory efficiency. The frontend uses modern JavaScript frameworks.

### How does OpenObserve handle data storage?

OpenObserve uses a columnar database format optimized for observability data. This allows for efficient compression and fast query performance, even with large datasets.

### What integrations does OpenObserve support?

OpenObserve supports standard protocols like Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Fluent Bit, Vector, and more. It can integrate with most modern application stacks and infrastructure.

### How does OpenObserve handle high cardinality data?

OpenObserve is designed to efficiently handle high cardinality data through its columnar storage format and optimized indexing strategies, allowing for better performance with dimensionally rich data.

## Pricing

### How is OpenObserve priced?

OpenObserve offers both open-source and cloud options. The open-source version is free to use. For OpenObserve Cloud, we offer usage-based pricing that scales with your needs, typically at a fraction of the cost of comparable solutions.

### How can I estimate my costs for OpenObserve Cloud?

Your costs will depend on your data volume and product usage.

## Support

### What support options are available?

We offer community support through our [OpenObserve Slack Community](https://short.openobserve.ai/community/). For OpenObserve Cloud customers, we provide email support, with additional options for premium support with SLAs available on higher-tier plans.

### Is there documentation available for OpenObserve?

Yes, we provide comprehensive documentation covering installation, configuration, usage, and best practices at [docs.openobserve.ai ](/docs/).

### Do you offer professional services or implementation help?

Yes, we offer professional services for custom implementations, migrations from other platforms, and optimization of your observability stack. Contact our sales team for details.

### How can I report bugs or request features?

You can report bugs and request features through our GitHub repository. For OpenObserve Cloud customers, you can also submit requests through our support portal.