OTel + Apache Iceberg: The New Standard for Observability
Session Abstract
Observability is moving from vendor stacks to open standards. This talk presents a design where OpenTelemetry provides collection and semantic context, and Apache Iceberg is the data layer for logs, metrics, and traces. We cover portability, governance, agent investigation, and write-path pitfalls: drift, small files, compaction.
Session Description
Observability is shifting from vendor-specific stacks to an open, composable architecture. This talk presents a reference design where OpenTelemetry provides collection, context propagation, and semantic normalization, and Apache Iceberg becomes the open data layer for logs, metrics, and traces. We will explain why this pairing is emerging as a practical standard for portability and governance, and why it fits agent-driven investigation workflows. The focus is on production write-path realities: schema drift, high cardinality, small-file control, commit and compaction strategy, and streaming aggregation patterns that keep latency and cost predictable.
