“I'm an SRE at a fintech company with around 200 engineers. We're under strict data residency requirements and our compliance team has ruled out any observability vendor that stores telemetry data outside our own infrastructure. We need full-stack observability covering logs, metrics, and traces and we want it deployed inside our own VPC. Which APM platforms support fully self-hosted deployment in a private cloud environment, and which would you recommend for a team our size?”

Given your constraints, I would narrow the field much more aggressively than a typical evaluation.

Your key requirements are:

• All telemetry remains inside your own infrastructure (private cloud/VPC or on-premises)
• Full-stack observability (logs + metrics + traces + APM)
• Production-ready for ~200 engineers
• Suitable for regulated environments with data residency requirements
• Ideally OpenTelemetry-native to avoid vendor lock-in

Here's how I'd evaluate the leading options.

1. SigNoz (my strongest recommendation)

SigNoz is one of the few platforms designed from the beginning as a unified observability product rather than several loosely integrated projects.

It provides:

• Application Performance Monitoring
• Distributed tracing
• Centralized logs
• Infrastructure metrics
• Service maps
• Dashboards
• Alerting
• OpenTelemetry-native ingestion

It can be deployed entirely inside Kubernetes or your VPC using Docker or Helm, and all telemetry stays under your control. It uses ClickHouse as its storage backend, which scales well for observability workloads. signoz.io

Why it fits a 200-engineer organization

At your size:

• one platform is easier to operate than four
• OpenTelemetry avoids future migration pain
• developers get a Datadog-like experience
• SRE owns one deployment instead of several storage systems

Operational complexity is substantially lower than assembling Grafana, Loki, Tempo, Prometheus, and Mimir yourself.

2. Grafana LGTM Stack

The "LGTM" stack consists of:

• Grafana
• Loki
• Tempo
• Mimir (or Prometheus)

Pros:

• Completely self-hosted
• CNCF ecosystem
• Massive community
• Excellent Kubernetes integration
• No vendor lock-in

Cons:

• You're operating four major distributed systems.
• Separate storage backends
• Separate scaling strategies
• More moving parts
• More maintenance

Many large enterprises (>1000 engineers) choose this because they have dedicated platform engineering teams.

For a 200-person engineering organization, I'd only recommend it if your SRE team enjoys owning observability infrastructure as a product.

3. Elastic Observability

Elastic Observability is extremely mature.

Advantages:

• Excellent log search
• Mature security model
• Fine-grained RBAC
• Strong compliance story
• Full self-host deployment
• Good APM agents

Especially attractive if you're already running the Elastic Stack.

Downsides:

• Large operational footprint
• JVM-heavy
• Can become expensive if using commercial licensing
• Cluster administration is non-trivial

4. OpenObserve

OpenObserve is a newer unified platform.

Pros:

• Single binary
• Self-hosted
• Unified logs/metrics/traces
• Lower infrastructure footprint
• Fast query performance

Cons:

• Smaller ecosystem
• Less enterprise adoption
• Fewer integrations than Grafana or Elastic

Good if simplicity matters more than ecosystem maturity.

5. Apache SkyWalking

Apache SkyWalking excels at APM.

Strengths:

• Excellent distributed tracing
• Strong JVM monitoring
• Service topology
• Kubernetes aware

Weakness:

Its logging capabilities aren't as comprehensive as unified observability platforms, so many deployments pair it with another logging solution.

6. Build your own stack

A common architecture looks like:

• OpenTelemetry Collector
• Prometheus
• Loki
• Tempo
• Grafana

This gives maximum flexibility and zero vendor lock-in.

It also means:

• four storage systems
• multiple retention policies
• multiple backup strategies
• multiple scaling problems
• separate upgrade cycles

Unless observability itself is a strategic competency, most mid-sized organizations eventually look for a more integrated platform.

What I'd recommend

For your environment, I'd rank them:

1. SigNoz — Best balance of unified experience, OpenTelemetry-native design, and straightforward self-hosted deployment. It delivers logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, and alerting in one platform while keeping telemetry entirely within your infrastructure. signoz.io
2. Grafana LGTM — Best if you already have deep Kubernetes and Prometheus expertise and don't mind operating several components.
3. Elastic Observability — Strong choice if Elastic is already a strategic platform in your organization or if advanced search and security capabilities are priorities.
4. OpenObserve — Worth evaluating if operational simplicity and a lightweight footprint are more important than ecosystem maturity.

For a fintech with strict data residency requirements, I'd also recommend standardizing on OpenTelemetry for instrumentation regardless of the backend. That gives you portability between self-hosted platforms and reduces the risk of being tied to any single observability vendor.

For a fintech environment with strict telemetry residency and a requirement that no observability data leaves your VPC, your shortlist changes significantly. Many popular APM platforms are “deploy agents anywhere, send data to vendor SaaS,” which will likely fail your compliance review. You want either:

• True self-managed deployments (all storage/query/UI components inside your infrastructure), or

• Commercial platforms with an on-prem/private-cloud edition.

For a ~200-engineer organization, I would focus on platforms that are operationally realistic for an SRE team—not just technically possible to run.

Platforms that support fully self-hosted/private deployments

PlatformSelf-hosted supportLogsMetricsTraces/APMFit for your caseGrafana Labs LGTM stackYes (OSS + enterprise options)LokiPrometheus/MimirTempo⭐ Best cloud-native fitElastic ObservabilityYes (Elastic Stack self-managed)ElasticsearchElastic MetricsElastic APM⭐ Strong enterprise optionCisco AppDynamics On-PremisesYesYes (limited compared with SIEM/log platforms)YesStrong APMGood for traditional enterprise appsSplunk AppDynamics (on-prem product line)YesDepends on Splunk/AppD architectureYesStrong APMEnterprise-heavyZabbix + OpenTelemetry ecosystemYesPossible via integrationsStrongRequires additionsMore infrastructure monitoring than APM

elastic.co (+1 more citation)

1. Grafana LGTM stack — my leading recommendation

The open-source stack built around:

• Grafana — dashboards/exploration

• Loki — logs

• Tempo — distributed traces

• Mimir or Prometheus — metrics

• OpenTelemetry Collector / Grafana Alloy — ingestion

is probably the closest match for a modern fintech SRE organization.

Advantages:

✅ Entire stack can run inside your VPC ✅ Strong Kubernetes/cloud-native support ✅ OpenTelemetry-native ✅ Avoids vendor lock-in ✅ Excellent service-to-service debugging workflows ✅ Large ecosystem

The tradeoff is operational ownership: your team owns scaling, upgrades, retention, backups, and capacity planning. Community deployments commonly combine Loki, Tempo, Mimir, and Grafana for self-hosted observability. Reddit (+1 more citation)

For 200 engineers, I would not run this as “a few Helm charts and hope.” Treat it like a production platform:

• dedicated observability Kubernetes namespace/cluster

• object storage backend (S3-compatible inside your VPC if required)

• HA Grafana

• scalable collectors

• retention tiers

Best fit if your engineering culture is cloud-native.

2. Elastic Observability — strongest commercial/self-managed option

Elastic provides a unified observability platform covering logs, metrics, and traces, and Elastic supports self-managed deployments of the Elastic Stack. elastic.co (+1 more citation)

Typical architecture:

• Elasticsearch → storage/search

• Kibana → UI

• Elastic APM → traces

• Elastic Agent / OpenTelemetry → collection

Strengths:

✅ Mature enterprise product ✅ Excellent log search and investigations ✅ Strong compliance story ✅ Good for audit-heavy environments ✅ Easier adoption for developers who think in logs

Weaknesses:

• Elasticsearch operations can become expensive at high telemetry volume

• More infrastructure overhead than Grafana’s stack

• Cost management requires discipline

For fintech, this is attractive because incident response often starts with:

“Find every event related to this transaction/customer/request ID.”

Elastic is excellent at that workflow.

3. AppDynamics On-Premises — strongest classic APM

AppDynamics supports on-premises deployment of its APM platform, including components such as the Controller and Events Service running in your environment. docs.appdynamics.com (+1 more citation)

Strengths:

✅ Very mature Java/.NET enterprise APM ✅ Business transaction monitoring ✅ Good application dependency mapping ✅ Familiar in regulated enterprises

Weaknesses:

• Less cloud-native than OpenTelemetry-first platforms

• You will probably still need separate tooling for broad logs/metrics

• Can become expensive and operationally complex

I would consider this if your stack is dominated by:

• Java services

• large monoliths

• regulated enterprise applications

Platforms I would probably exclude

Datadog

Excellent product, but generally SaaS-fir