Best Self Hosted Alternatives to LogSnag

Operational is an open-source event tracking and alerting tool designed for product teams and SaaS operators to monitor critical events and receive real-time notifications. It focuses on high-value operational events (signups, cronjobs, payments, webhooks) rather than broad product analytics.

Key Features

• Real-time timeline of incoming events with push notifications to web and mobile (PWA) clients
• Action Buttons on events to trigger webhooks or run actions within your product
• Support for nested contexts (events-in-events) to represent complex workflows
• Lightweight SDKs for easy ingestion from applications and services
• Built with a simple stack (Node.js / Express backend, Vue 3 frontend) and stores data in MySQL via Prisma; optional analytics/backends can be added
• Designed for low dependencies and straightforward self-hosting using Docker or standard Node tooling

Use Cases

• Receive immediate alerts for high-priority product events such as new signups, payments, or failed jobs
• Debug and trace webhooks or cronjobs by ingesting and inspecting structured JSON event payloads
• Provide on-call or operations teams a lightweight timeline and actionable events to resolve incidents quickly

Limitations and Considerations

• Not a replacement for full product analytics platforms; optimized for tracking key operational events rather than high-volume behavioral analytics
• SDK coverage is smaller than large analytics vendors; additional language wrappers may be required for some stacks

Operational provides a focused, developer-friendly way to surface and act on critical events in your product. It is built to be easy to self-host, extend, and integrate into existing workflows.