SeaGL 2025 Talk: Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores

CONFERENCE TALK

SeaGL 2025 Talk: Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores

Joshua Lee, is presenting the talk Magical Mystery Tour: A Roundup of Observability Datastores at the SeaGL 2025 Conference. The 2025 conference will be held November 7-8.

From plain-old Postgres to the LGTM stack, ELK, Cassandra, and ClickHouse, the landscape of telemetry storage options is as vast as it is overwhelming. With so many choices, how do we decide which datastore is right for the job?

In this talk, Joshua will guide attendees through the foundational principles of telemetry—covering metrics, traces, logs, profiles, and wide events—and break down the strengths and limitations of different database technologies for each use case.

We’ll examine how traditional relational databases like Postgres can still hold their own, where ELK and CockroachDB fit into the picture, and why specialized stacks like LGTM (Loki, Grafana, Tempo, Mimir) are so popular in modern observability pipelines. And, of course, we’ll highlight the growing role of ClickHouse as a versatile and high-performance option for logs, traces, and more and VictoriaMetrics as a drop-in replacement for Prometheus.

By the end of this session, attendees will have a clearer understanding of the trade-offs between these datastores and how to make informed decisions based on the unique requirements of their systems. Whether you’re building an observability stack from scratch or looking to optimize an existing setup, this tour of the observability datastore landscape will leave you better equipped to navigate the options.

Benefits to ecosystem: This talk benefits the CNCF ecosystem by demystifying the vast telemetry datastore landscape, highlighting how tools like Postgres, ELK, LGTM, and ClickHouse fit specific observability needs. It fosters informed decisions, promotes optimal tool use, and advances CNCF’s mission of efficient cloud-native observability.

About the Presenter

Joshua Lee – Open Source Developer Advocate at Altinity

Whether it’s operators or observability, agile or accessibility, his expertise shines because he is passionate about all of it. He’s been building software for more than a decade and he loves sharing experiences via public speaking. He is currently a Developer Advocate for Altinity where he helps create educational content about ClickHouse® and OpenTelemetry, and he is a contributor to the OpenTelemetry project.