Elastic architects reveal how to query observability data in plain English

Keeping observability data locked behind the SRE job function is a mistake. Today’s leading companies are making operational data available to their entire staff, turning what was once an internal bottleneck into a tool that helps application owners, product managers, and even finance teams question their data directly in plain English.

No one wants to wait for a busy SRE to get back to their question. App owners want to know why fewer people are signing up for their service now, PMs want to understand why their new feature is underperforming now, and finance teams want to understand dependency impacts now.

You don’t have to throw bodies at your observability data to mine answers for operational and other non-technical staff. Thanks to the open-source project OpenTelemetry and generative AI, your entire team can query operational data in natural language without needing an SRE to hold their hand.

Companies are generating more telemetry data than ever before, while AI models are improving week in, week out. It’s good news and bad news. You can’t tame your telemetry data without AI, but if you do the work to de-silo your data, you can turn a problem (expanding telemetry information inflow) into a democratized knowledge base that any employee can learn from on their own schedule.

At 10 a.m. Pacific/1 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday, May 12, The New Stack will host a conversation with Elastic solutions architects Thaddeus Walsh and Brad Quarry to go deep on how modern companies are unifying their observability data and applying generative AI to the corpus. Those companies can make data-driven decisions across their organizations without multiplying their SRE headcount.

Register here to join the conversation:

What you’ll take away:

• How to escape observability data silos: You can’t make data-driven decisions if your data is fragmented, and each storage system requires its own querying technique. We’ll discuss the power of OpenTelemetry and why your company should consider using it as the basis for AI-powered, natural-language observability queries.
• How to unlock observability data for all: Your non-technical staff needs to understand how apps and services are performing, but don’t want browser timing data or error logs. We’ll dig into how genAI set against unified observability data turns logs into insight.
• How to query in natural language: Providing access to raw operational data is only so useful. But, as Thaddeus and Brad will explain, once you have your data prepared and AI set up, anyone can query observability data in plain English and receive answers in the same format.