Our learnings with OTEL Traces in columnar files

Traces are one of most difficult observability signals to work with. You need a lot of work on the application and infrastructure instrumentation to get it right.

Once the hard work is done on the client side, you'd expect to extract max value from the this trace data (and not set small retention to save cost).

We worked hard to understand (and explain) how OTEL traces can be efficiently stored, queried and analysed on Parseable using the ubiquitous Parquet file format. Read on!