Ultraviolet Observability runs entirely inside your environment. Capture traces, logs, metrics and service topology with no code changes — and every byte of that telemetry stays on your infrastructure. No vendor egress. No per-GB surprise. Works air-gapped.
Datadog and Groundcover are good products with the same structural problem: your telemetry — request payload shapes, internal hostnames, customer identifiers leaking through log lines — has to leave your perimeter to be useful. For regulated, defense, and on-prem workloads, that is where the evaluation ends.
Traces, logs and metrics are stored inside your network and queried from inside your network. There is no vendor pipeline to trust, no DPA to negotiate over telemetry contents, and no third-party breach that can expose your production internals.
The core is offline-first, not offline-tolerant. Every feature — ingest, query, dashboards, alerting — functions on a cluster that has never resolved a public DNS name. Air-gapped installs run on a hand-carried signed license.
Storage lives on your disks under a retention policy you set. Keeping 90 days of full-fidelity spans is a hardware decision, not a line item — so nobody has to argue about sampling rates to hit a budget.
The only thing that ever crosses your firewall is a license heartbeat — node counts and an expiry date. Never a span, never a log line.
Traces, logs, metrics, infrastructure and more — captured with no code changes, stored on infrastructure you operate, and explored through one interface.
Every request is captured as a request/response transaction with real latency, status codes and errors — across HTTP, gRPC, DNS, Postgres, MySQL, Redis, Kafka and MongoDB. No SDKs, no sidecars, and no redeploy to start collecting.
Metrics land alongside your traces and logs, with OpenTelemetry, Prometheus remote-write and Fluent Bit all pointing at one place.
Log ingest with severity facets, live tail and full-text search — pivoting both directions between a log line and the trace that produced it.
Topology derived from the calls your services actually make, not a config file someone forgot to update. Edges carry call volume, latency and byte flow.
Node and workload health with a live Kubernetes object inventory, so you can see the cluster behind the request.
Build dashboards over any signal, track SLOs with error budgets and burn-rate alerts, and import the Datadog dashboards you already have.
Rules are evaluated inside the core on the same signals the dashboards use, then routed to the tools your team already watches.
Browser performance, Core Web Vitals and JS errors with session replay — stitched to the backend trace behind each slow page. Masking is on by default; the DOM never leaves your infrastructure.
Remote clusters dial home over outbound mTLS. No inbound ports at the edge, and site_id is a first-class dimension in every query.
Ultraviolet speaks OTLP over gRPC and HTTP. Anything you have already instrumented — an SDK, a Collector — points at it and lands in the same store.
One core per customer — no multi-tenancy, no shared storage, no shared query layer. Remote sites dial in; we run nothing but a license desk.
Air-gapped? Skip this entirely — carry in an annual license file and reconcile usage with a signed export.
Groundcover proved that automatic instrumentation beats hand-written SDKs, and that keeping data in your own cloud beats shipping it to a vendor. We take the last step: the platform itself runs inside your environment, so nothing about it depends on us being reachable.
| Ultraviolet | Groundcover | Datadog | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where telemetry is stored | Your cluster, your disks | Your cloud account, vendor-operated | Vendor cloud |
| Vendor-managed control plane required | No — the core is yours | Yes — SaaS control plane | Yes — fully SaaS |
| Runs fully air-gapped | Yes, licensed option | No | No |
| Instrumentation | Automatic — no code changes | Automatic — no code changes | Agent + APM libraries per language |
| Retention policy owner | You — retention you set | You, within vendor tooling | Vendor plan tiers |
| Billing unit | Node-minutes, committed + overage | Nodes | Hosts + ingested GB + indexed spans |
| Cost of keeping more data | Disk | Your cloud storage | Metered per GB and per span |
| What crosses your firewall | License heartbeat only | Control-plane metadata + queries | All telemetry |
Comparison reflects each vendor's publicly documented deployment model. Product capabilities move quickly — we're happy to walk through a current, specific side-by-side on a call.
We sample your active node set every 30 seconds and sum it into node-minutes. Ingest volume, span count, retention window and cardinality are all free — they cost disk you already own, not a metered line item.
A full-function core in your own cluster. Not a hosted sandbox — the real thing, on your nodes.
The default. A 30-day license renews itself over an outbound call that carries node counts and nothing else.
For environments where an outbound connection is not a policy question — it is a physical fact.
A node counts while a collector on it is alive — an installed-but-idle node still meters, a node that scaled down at 14:03 stops metering at 14:03. Usage rolls up in an append-only ledger inside your core, visible to you on the license page before it is ever visible to us.
If yours is not here, we would rather answer it directly than write around it.
Ask an engineerYou do — it installs as a Helm chart and runs like any other workload in your cluster. We size it with you, ship signed images and charts, and support upgrades. There is no hidden dependency that phones us for the core to function.
Collection is lightweight and needs no code changes, no sidecars and no libraries added to your services. It reads only a bounded prefix of each request — never whole payloads — so a busy node typically stays under one percent of a core, with no build step or compiler required on your nodes.
No. Traces across HTTP, gRPC, DNS and the major databases are captured with no code changes. If your services already emit OpenTelemetry, point them at Ultraviolet and those spans and logs land in the same store, correlated by trace ID.
It degrades, it does not crash. Past expiry you enter a grace window with full function and a renewal banner — on a connected core the auto-renewal normally closes it before anyone notices. Past the hard stop, ingest keeps running (it is your data on your disks; we will not blind you) and the UI locks to the license page until a fresh license is dropped in.
Your core keeps an append-only usage ledger locally. At renewal you export it as a signed report and we reconcile. Capacity is soft — going over your committed nodes produces a warning in the product and a line on the true-up, never a block on ingest.
Yes. Remote sites dial the core over outbound mTLS on 443 — no inbound ports at the edge — and buffer to disk so a WAN outage delays data rather than losing it. Every span carries a site_id, so you can scope any view to one site or roll up the fleet.
There is none, deliberately. One core belongs to one customer, and RBAC inside the core is the isolation boundary. That removes an entire class of cross-tenant risk that a shared platform has to engineer around.
It is already out — it lives in an open, standard columnar database you own and operate. Query it with standard SQL tooling, back it up with your existing tools, and keep it if you ever stop paying us. There is no export request and no proprietary format holding it.
A 30-minute call, then an evaluation core on your infrastructure. You will see your own service map — built from your own traffic — before you decide anything.
