▲ | CSDude a day ago | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Blanket statements like this miss the point. Not all data is waste. Especially high-cardinality, non-sampled traces. On a 4-core ClickHouse node, we handled millions of spans per minute. Even short retention windows provided critical visibility for debugging and analysis. Sure, we should cut waste, but compression exists for a reason. Dropping valuable observability data to save space is usually shortsighted. And storage isn't the bottleneck it used to be. Tiered storage with S3 or similar backends is cheap and lets you keep full-fidelity data without breaking the budget. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | ofrzeta a day ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
> Dropping valuable observability data to save space is usually shortsighted That's a bit of a blanket statement, too :) I've seen many systems where a lot of stuff is logged without much thought. "Connection to database successful" - does this need to be logged on every connection request? Log level info, warning, debug? Codebases are full of this. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
▲ | jiggawatts a day ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I agree with both you and the person you're replying to, but... My centrist take is that data can be represented wastefully, which is often ignored. Most "wide" log formats are implemented... naively. Literally just JSON REST APIs or the equivalent. Years ago I did some experiments where I captured every single metric Windows Server emits every second. That's about 15K metrics, down to dozens of metrics per process, per disk, per everything! There is a poorly documented API for grabbing everything ('*') as a binary blob of a bunch of 64-bit counters. My trick was that I then kept the previous such blob and simply took the binary difference. This set most values to zero, so then a trivial run length encoding (RLE) reduced a few hundred KB to a few hundred bytes. Collect an hour of that, compress, and you can store per-second metrics collected over a month for thousands of servers in a few terabytes. Then you can apply a simple "transpose" transformation to turn this into a bunch of columns and get 1000:1 compression ratios. The data just... crunches down into gigabytes that can be queried and graphed in real time. I've experimented with Open Telemetry, and its flagrantly wasteful data representations make me depressed. Why must everything be JSON!? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|