How to Use Dash0: The Beginner's Guide (First Export, the Three-Pillars Lesson, and the First-Dashboard Arc)

CodexFuse Team · 2026-11-07T08:27:05.593Z · 20 min read min read

How Do You Use Dash0?

Learning how to use dash0 starts with one idea: Dash0 is the OpenTelemetry-native observability backend that receives your telemetry and turns it into traces, metrics, logs, and dashboards. You sign up for a 14-day trial, copy your organization endpoint and auth token from the settings, and point an OpenTelemetry exporter at Dash0. Your first spans, logs, and metrics then appear in the Explorer, and from there you build dashboards and alerts.

This dash0 tutorial follows the official Dash0 documentation, and every fact checked as of November 2026. The guide also links once to its open-source sibling, and the SigNoz beginner guide covers the self-hosted alternative for readers who want to run their own backend. SigNoz is the self-hosted open-source sibling, and Dash0 is the commercial SaaS side of that pair.

1. Create a trial account at dash0.com/sign-up.
2. Copy your OTLP endpoint and auth token from Settings.
3. Point an OpenTelemetry Collector or SDK at that endpoint.
4. Send your first spans, logs, and metrics.
5. Open the Explorer and confirm your service appears.
6. Build your first dashboard from a Perses template.
7. Create your first check rule so Dash0 alerts you.

What Is Dash0?

Dash0 is an OpenTelemetry-native observability platform that accepts traces, metrics, and logs through the open OTLP standard and stores them in its SignalStore backend. The company was founded in 2023 by Mirko Novakovic, who previously founded Instana, and the platform reached general availability in November 2024. The GitHub organization behind its open tooling is 1,371 days old, or 3.75 years, as of this guide.

Dash0 is a closed-source SaaS product, and only its tooling is open source, so open-source stars measure the tooling, not the product. Its most-starred repository is otelbin, a web editor for OpenTelemetry Collector configuration, with 585 stars, while the Kubernetes operator has 69 stars and the command-line tool has 19 stars. Otelbin has 8.48 times the stars of the operator and 30.79 times the stars of the CLI, otelbin earns 18.87 stars per fork against 3.0 for the operator, and the open-issue counts in the table include pull requests.

This dash0 review covers what a beginner needs: signup, first export, the three pillars, the first dashboard, the first alert, and the price. Dash0 positions itself for the AI era with Agent0, an autonomous production assistant that reached general availability on 2026-06-03, which is 157 days before this guide. The company also acquired Polar Signals for continuous profiling 82 days before this guide, and its Series B funding of 110 million dollars at a 1 billion dollar valuation was announced 229 days before this guide.

Dash0 raised a 9.5 million dollar seed round, a 35 million dollar Series A, and a 110 million dollar Series B, and those three rounds sum to 154.5 million dollars against a reported total of 155 million dollars, a 0.5 million dollar difference the reported figures do not explain. The Series A was announced 401 days before this guide, and the Series B followed 172 days after it. The company reports more than 600 paying customers, and the GitHub organization lists 66 public repositories.

The Series B round is 11.0 percent of the 1 billion dollar valuation on paper.

Dash0 is not Plotly Dash, not PreEmptive DashO, and not a Dash room display. The name collisions pollute search results for dash0 tutorial, so check that a result is about the observability platform before following it. Vendor claims in this guide are attributed, not stated as independent facts.

Mirko Novakovic previously founded Instana, and the IBM acquisition year for Instana is omitted because sources disagree. Some sources report 2020 and others report 2021, and this guide states no year rather than pick one. The disagreement is small, and it does not change anything a beginner needs to do with Dash0.

How Much Does Dash0 Cost?

Dash0 pricing starts with a 14-day trial, and a 14-day trial is not a free tier. Dash0 offers no permanent free plan, and the trial needs no credit card and unlocks every feature, including Agent0 credits. After the trial, you pay only for the telemetry you send, with no base platform fee, no per-seat fee, and no per-host fee.

Spans, logs, and web events cost 0.60 dollars per million in total, split into 0.060 dollars for ingestion and 0.540 dollars for storage. Metric data points cost 0.20 dollars per million in total, split into 0.020 dollars for ingestion and 0.180 dollars for storage. Storage is 90.0 percent of the spans bill and ingestion is 10.0 percent, so keeping data longer costs far more than sending it.

Ten million spans cost 6.00 dollars, and 100 million spans cost 60.00 dollars, while 10 million metric points cost 2.00 dollars and 100 million cost 20.00 dollars. Synthetic checks cost 0.20 dollars per thousand runs, and session replays cost 2.00 dollars per thousand, which makes replays 10.0 times the price of synthetic checks. Agent0 costs 0.60 dollars per credit, so a full root-cause analysis at 2 credits costs 1.20 dollars and 10 credits cost 6.00 dollars.

The third-party flat figures are the same totals, not a different price. Older comparison pages quote 0.60 dollars per million for spans and 0.20 dollars per million for metrics, and those are the same totals the official page now splits into ingestion and storage. The official pricing page is the canonical source, and the split presentation is the current one.

How Do You Sign Up for Dash0?

Sign up at dash0.com/sign-up for the 14-day unlimited trial, which needs no credit card. The trial unlocks every feature, including infrastructure monitoring, Kubernetes, APM, tracing, logs, web, session replay, synthetics, dashboards, alerting, and Agent0 credits. After signup, the onboarding screen at app.dash0.com/onboarding shows per-platform and per-language instructions for sending data.

Your organization auth token lives at app.dash0.com/settings/auth-tokens, and your OTLP endpoint lives in the endpoints settings page. Tokens are static tokens with an auth prefix, and the OTLP endpoint accepts only those static tokens, not OAuth access tokens. Copy your own endpoint from your Dash0 settings, never paste the example verbatim.

The endpoint is per organization, and its region and cloud segment change with your organization, so the example endpoint in this guide is a shape, not your address. Dash0 also offers a built-in OpenTelemetry demo application, so you can explore the product with no setup at all. If you send no telemetry, you pay nothing, because the minimum monthly bill is 0 dollars.

How Do You Send Your First Telemetry to Dash0?

A dash0 opentelemetry export starts with one endpoint and one token. The OTLP gRPC endpoint has the shape ingress.eu-west-1.aws.dash0.com:4317, where the region and cloud segments match your organization. The OTLP HTTP endpoint is the same host over HTTPS with no port, because port 4318 belongs to a local collector, not to Dash0 ingress.

The fastest first export runs through an OpenTelemetry Collector, and the Docker beginner guide covers the container runtime the collector usually runs in. The collector exporter points at your Dash0 ingress endpoint and authenticates with a bearer auth extension, and the token value carries no literal Bearer prefix. The app then sends its telemetry to the local collector, not directly to Dash0, which keeps credentials in one place.

No commands in this guide were executed in a live testbed by the writer. Every command here is transcribed from the official Dash0 documentation as fetched on 2026-11-07, so treat the docs as the authority if a flag has moved since. The examples below show the documented shape with your own endpoint and token substituted in.

exporters:
  otlp/dash0:
    auth:
      authenticator: bearertokenauth/dash0
    endpoint: ingress.eu-west-1.aws.dash0.com:4317

OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:4317
OTEL_EXPORTER_OTLP_PROTOCOL=grpc
OTEL_SERVICE_NAME=my-first-service
OTEL_RESOURCE_ATTRIBUTES=deployment.environment=development

How Do You Install Dash0 on Kubernetes?

A dash0 install on Kubernetes starts with one Helm command, and the Kubernetes beginner guide covers the cluster the operator runs on. The operator installs an OpenTelemetry Collector into your cluster, sends data to your Dash0 ingress endpoint with auth pre-configured, and gathers traces, logs, and metrics from your workloads. Kubernetes 1.25.16 or later and Helm 3 or later are required.

helm repo add dash0-operator https://dash0hq.github.io/dash0-operator
helm repo update dash0-operator
helm install --wait --namespace dash0-system --create-namespace --set operator.dash0Export.enabled=true --set operator.dash0Export.endpoint=ingress.eu-west-1.aws.dash0.com:4317 --set operator.dash0Export.apiEndpoint=YOUR_DASH0_API_ENDPOINT --set operator.dash0Export.token=YOUR_AUTH_TOKEN dash0-operator dash0-operator/dash0-operator

The operator chart version and the operator app version use different numbers. ArtifactHub lists the Helm chart at 0.87.0, while the GitHub releases show the operator app at 0.159.0, published 4 days before this guide. Quote the release number from the source you checked, and check again before you install.

After the install, you enable monitoring per namespace with a Dash0Monitoring custom resource, and the operator then auto-instruments supported workloads. Java 8 and later, Node.js 16 and later, and .NET 6 and later are instrumented automatically, while Python and Ruby 3.3 and later are opt-in. Metrics and log collection do not depend on the runtime at all.

What Are the Three Pillars of Observability in Dash0?

The three pillars are traces, metrics, and logs, and Dash0 adds resources as a fourth signal that ties them together. A trace follows one request across services, a metric counts or measures something over time, and a log records one event with context. Resources describe the service, host, or pod the signal came from, so all three pillars share the same identity.

Traces answer where time went, and Dash0 keeps spans and span events for 30 days. Metrics answer how much and how fast, and Dash0 keeps metric data points for 13 months, which is about 390 days and 13.0 times the span retention. Logs answer what happened, and Dash0 keeps log records for 30 days, the same as spans.

Start with traces when a request is slow, start with metrics when a dashboard turns red, and start with logs when an error needs its story. One signal rarely explains an incident alone, and the three pillars earn their keep when you move between them on the same service. That movement is the skill this guide builds toward, and the dashboard section is where it becomes a habit.

How Do You Build Your First Dashboard in Dash0?

An opentelemetry dashboard dash0 beginners build first shows one service on one canvas: its request rate, its error rate, its latency, and its log volume. Dash0 dashboards are built on Perses, the CNCF dashboard standard, so a dashboard is a document you can store, review, and version. The Git beginner guide covers the version-control habit that makes dashboards-as-code work.

You can build a dashboard in the web UI, or manage it as code with a PersesDashboard custom resource, the Terraform provider, or the dash0 CLI. The as-code routes all accept the same dashboard document, so a dashboard you click together can later live in Git. Start in the UI for speed, and move to code when the dashboard becomes something your team depends on.

A good first dashboard has four panels and one purpose, and every panel answers a question a human would ask at 3 in the morning. Add latency percentiles before averages, because averages hide the slow requests your users feel. Leave the demo data behind as soon as your own telemetry flows, because a dashboard over demo data teaches you the tool and nothing about your service.

How Do You Set Up Your First Alert in Dash0?

Alerts in Dash0 are check rules, which are Prometheus-style rules that evaluate a query on a schedule. The Prometheus beginner guide covers the query language the rules are written in. A check rule needs an Admin or Maintainer role in the dataset, and it routes through notification channels such as Slack, PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or a webhook.

Evaluation intervals run from 1 minute, which is the default, up to 1 hour, and you can import existing Prometheus alert rules instead of rewriting them. The 400-plus alert templates figure comes from a third-party directory, not an official Dash0 page. Start with one alert on error rate and one on latency, and add more only after the first two have proven they fire when they should.

Dash0 includes 25 SLOs per organization, and measurement starts when you create one, with a 5-minute delay and no backfill. Agent0 can generate SLO, check-rule, and dashboard configurations from a prompt, and a five-prompt SLO guide was published 3 days before this guide. Treat generated rules as drafts, and read each one before it starts paging your team.

Dash0 vs SigNoz: Which One Fits Your Team?

Dash0 vs signoz is the comparison most readers ask about, and the honest answer starts with deployment. Dash0 is SaaS-only, with no self-hosted edition, while SigNoz offers a free self-hosted Community Edition plus Cloud, BYOC, and Enterprise. If you must run observability inside your own infrastructure, that fact alone decides the comparison.

Both platforms are OpenTelemetry-native, so both accept OTLP logs, metrics, and traces without a vendor agent. The billing meters differ, and a direct dollar comparison needs identical workloads, so this guide states the meters and not a winner. Dash0 bills per million signals with ingestion and storage split, while SigNoz Cloud bills logs and traces per gigabyte and metrics per million samples.

SigNoz Cloud Teams starts at 49 dollars per month, which includes 49 dollars of usage, while Dash0 has a 0 dollar minimum and a 49 dollar gap to the SigNoz entry price. SigNoz's criticisms of Dash0 are rival claims from SigNoz, not independently verified facts. Its page also concedes that Dash0 is easier to use and has broader workflows, synthetic monitoring, and real-user monitoring, so read both vendors before you choose.

What Are the Seven Mistakes Beginners Make with Dash0?

Beginners lose the most time to the same seven mistakes, and this table collects them so you can skip the tuition. Most of them come from treating Dash0 like a hosted Prometheus instead of an OTel-native platform with its own billing meter. Read the table once, then keep it beside your first export.

CodexFuse offers no Dash0 tool. The links in this guide point at live CodexFuse articles that teach the surrounding skills, and the Dash0 links point at the official documentation. If a step in this guide has moved since November 2026, the official docs are the authority.

Sources

The official Dash0 pricing page, fetched on 2026-11-07, supplies every price in this guide, including the 0.060 dollar ingestion and 0.540 dollar storage split for spans, logs, and web events and the 0.020 dollar and 0.180 dollar split for metrics. The official Dash0 documentation supplies the OTLP endpoint shapes, the auth token rules, the Kubernetes operator install, the auto-instrumentation runtimes, and the dashboard and check-rule pages. The operator overview page was updated on 2026-11-05, and the CLI command reference was updated the same week.

The GitHub API supplied the dash0hq organization record with 66 public repositories, the repository stars and forks, and the operator release 0.159.0 published on 2026-11-03. The Dash0 blog supplied the Series B announcement, the Agent0 general-availability post, the Polar Signals acquisition post, and the five-prompt SLO guide published on 2026-11-04. The SigNoz pricing page supplied the Cloud Teams price and the per-gigabyte and per-sample meters used in the comparison.

The AIPure Dash0 walkthrough, crawled 4 days before this guide, is the only independent step-by-step walkthrough found on page one, and its alert-template figure is attributed to it. Search results for dash0 tutorial were checked on 2026-11-07, and the Plotly Dash and PreEmptive DashO collisions were set aside as different products. No Facebook promotion applies to this guide.

from datetime import date

today = date(2026, 11, 7)

org_created = date(2023, 2, 5)
series_b = date(2026, 3, 23)
series_a = date(2025, 10, 2)
agent0_ga = date(2026, 6, 3)
polar = date(2026, 8, 17)
operator_rel = date(2026, 11, 3)
slo_blog = date(2026, 11, 4)

print("org age days", (today - org_created).days)
print("org age years", round((today - org_created).days / 365.25, 2))
print("series b age days", (today - series_b).days)
print("series a age days", (today - series_a).days)
print("series b minus series a days", (series_b - series_a).days)
print("agent0 ga age days", (today - agent0_ga).days)
print("polar age days", (today - polar).days)
print("operator release age days", (today - operator_rel).days)
print("slo blog age days", (today - slo_blog).days)
print("seed to series b months", (2026 - 2024) * 12 + (3 - 11))
print("ga to today months", (2026 - 2024) * 12 + (11 - 11))
print("funding sum", 9.5 + 35 + 110)
print("funding reported total", 155)
print("funding gap", 155 - (9.5 + 35 + 110))
print("series b share of valuation pct", round(110 / 1000 * 100, 1))
print("otelbin stars", 585)
print("operator stars", 69)
print("cli stars", 19)
print("otelbin vs operator ratio", round(585 / 69, 2))
print("otelbin vs cli ratio", round(585 / 19, 2))
print("otelbin stars per fork", round(585 / 31, 2))
print("operator stars per fork", round(69 / 23, 2))
print("spans total per million", round(0.060 + 0.540, 2))
print("metrics total per million", round(0.020 + 0.180, 2))
print("spans storage share pct", round(0.540 / 0.60 * 100, 1))
print("spans ingestion share pct", round(0.060 / 0.60 * 100, 1))
print("10m spans cost", round(10 * 0.60, 2))
print("100m spans cost", round(100 * 0.60, 2))
print("10m metrics cost", round(10 * 0.20, 2))
print("100m metrics cost", round(100 * 0.20, 2))
print("agent0 10 credits cost", round(10 * 0.60, 2))
print("agent0 2 credits cost", round(2 * 0.60, 2))
print("agent0 1 credit cost", 0.60)
print("signoz teams monthly", 49)
print("dash0 minimum monthly", 0)
print("signoz minus dash0 minimum", 49 - 0)
print("slos per org", 25)
print("metrics retention months", 13)
print("spans retention days", 30)
print("metrics retention days approx", 13 * 30)
print("metrics retention vs spans ratio", round(13 * 30 / 30, 1))
print("org public repos", 66)
print("paying customers plus", 600)
print("check rule default interval minutes", 1)
print("synthetics per thousand", 0.20)
print("replays per thousand", 2.00)
print("replays vs synthetics ratio", round(2.00 / 0.20, 1))

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Dash0 free?

Dash0 has no permanent free plan, and the only free access is a 14-day unlimited trial that needs no credit card. The trial unlocks every feature, including Agent0 credits, and after it ends you pay only for the telemetry you send. If you send no telemetry, you pay nothing, because there is no base fee.

How do I send data to Dash0?

You send data through the OTLP endpoint for your organization, using the endpoint and auth token from your Dash0 settings. The usual path is an OpenTelemetry Collector with an OTLP exporter pointed at your Dash0 ingress endpoint, or the Kubernetes operator for cluster workloads. Your apps send telemetry to the local collector, and the collector forwards it to Dash0.

What is the difference between Dash0 and SigNoz?

Dash0 is a commercial SaaS observability platform, and SigNoz is an open-source observability platform you can self-host for free or run as a managed cloud. Both are OpenTelemetry-native, so both accept the same OTLP telemetry from your apps. Choose Dash0 when you want a managed backend with no infrastructure to run, and choose SigNoz when you must keep the backend inside your own infrastructure.

Does Dash0 work with OpenTelemetry?

Dash0 is built from the ground up on OpenTelemetry, and OTLP is its native ingestion protocol. Standard OpenTelemetry SDKs, the OpenTelemetry Collector, and the Dash0 distributions all send data to the same ingress endpoint. Dash0 also builds on PromQL and Perses, so Prometheus queries and Perses dashboards work alongside the OTel data.

How much does Dash0 cost per month?

Dash0 has no fixed monthly price, because billing is usage-based with a 0 dollar minimum. One million spans cost 0.60 dollars in total, one million metric points cost 0.20 dollars, and Agent0 costs 0.60 dollars per credit. Monthly budget limits, spam filters, and a cost forecast are built in, so you can cap the bill before it surprises you.