Defining A Common Observability Query Language and Other Observability TAG Updates

The conference presentation discusses the importance of standardizing observability data and bridging the gap from a correlation perspective to make it more efficient and transformable. The goal is to reduce developer toil and help end-users correlate their data across systems.

• Observability data is difficult to analyze due to the large amounts of data emitted from cloud infrastructure, applications, and services
• Querying should be thought of as querying as code
• The primary problem is bridging the gap from a correlation perspective to make it more efficient and transformable
• The goal is to reduce developer toil and help end-users correlate their data across systems
• The work group will research, analyze, and make recommendations for future working groups or projects to implement a standard

The speaker, Chris Larson, who has been in observability for quite a while, has seen the problem of query languages over time and trying to correlate all these signals. He wanted to jump back into the industry and try to corral everybody, all the vendors, the end-users together and see if they could come up with some kind of query standardization across the industry that might unblock migrations and customer acquisition coming forward.

The CNCF Technical Advisory Group (TAG) on Observability serves as a discussion forum for topics related to observability of cloud native systems and workloads. We also produce supporting material and best practices for end users and provide guidance and coordination for CNCF observability projects working within the TAG’s scope. In this session the TAG co-chairs will provide an update on major observability projects in the CNCF, technology updates from these projects and opportunities to get involved in the TAG to build momentum on cross-collaboration across observability projects and the latest areas of discussion in the TAG meetings such as defining a specification for a general observability query language. We also invite observability practitioners, developers and contributors to join in for this session to discuss features, gaps and open source solutions for end-users.