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Question for those in the observability space: do moment-in-time observations preserve all of the dimensions of the event, and if so, how do most observability
by Xcelerate 3y ago
Question for those in the observability space: do moment-in-time observations preserve all of the dimensions of the event, and if so, how do most observability platforms compress the high volume of (ostensibly) low-rank data?
- withinboredom 3y ago> low-rank data? It's "low-rank" until that one day systems start shitting the bed, and you're trying to understand what is going on.
- Xcelerate 3y agoSure, but that's fine. You're only collecting high-rank data for a short period of time, and the massive trove of historical data lets you identify what's causing those anomalies quickly.
- rbetts 3y agoThere are three-ish strategies (usually employed in combination at scale). Columnar databases are very good at compressing time series data which often has runs of repeating values that can be run length encoded, repeating deltas (store the delta not the full value), or common strings that can be dictionary encoded. So you can persist a lot of raw data with quite good compression and fast-scannability. Most commercial TSDBs are now backed by column stores. And several now tier with local SSDs for hot data and S3 for colder data. If that's still too much data to store, you have to start throwing some away. Both sampling and materializing aggregates (and discarding the raw data) are popular techniques and can both be very reasonable trade offs.