From the Observability TAG: Designing a Common Query Language for Observability Data
Talkat KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025 · on Thursday, 2025-04-03· at 11:00· Level 3 | ICC Capital Suite 10-12·
summary
Observability TAG finalizes a semantic query spec in 2025 that uses SQL as the baseline and recommends a federated, select-only subset with an intermediate query plan and telemetry-specific syntactic sugar. Work includes interviews with 11 DSL designers, measured onboarding cost of about two weeks per bespoke language, and Google experiments adding pipe syntax (BigQuery/ZetaSQL, Databricks, Firebolt) showing rapid internal adoption. ML/vectorizing of telemetry is judged currently too costly at scale.
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chapters (4)
- 0:00Observability query standardization
- 13:25Challenges with observability queries
- 24:03SQL for observability queries
- 33:26Q&A
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