So, what is the closest thing in the open source world to what the author describes? (Setting aside the question of is it right for you, which, of course, depends.)
The ELK stack is a popular choice, albeit with a focus on search rather than OLAP.
If SaaS is an option, a simple staring point in AWS might be Data Firehose into S3 with Athena. Snowflake can load and query the data too. All of these tools have multiple frontend options with a proportional relationship between cost and user-friendliness.
I honestly just do this in PostgreSQL until my project outgrows it. Create a table with a JSONB column and as few indexes as possible to improve write throughput. Cover a timestamp column with a BRIN index to filter by date range.
Grafana agent as OTEL collector on the application hosts, Grafana Tempo as backend for traces, Loki for logs and Prometheus for Metrics.
The cool thing about Tempo it generates metrics for ingested spans and their labels (spanmetrics) so this allows us to explore “unknown unknowns” as the author calls it in a very cost efficient way.
> Tempo can ingest common open source tracing protocols, including Jaeger, Zipkin, and OpenTelemetry.