The Invisible Tax: How Data Format Conversions Drive up Telemetry... Cijo Thomas & Joshua MacDonald
Opentelemetry Telemetry pipelines Observability Data format conversion Cloud native Pipeline optimization Collector performance Cost optimization Marshaling overhead Kubecon
This talk presents quantitative research on the hidden costs of data format conversions in telemetry pipelines. Cijo Thomas and Joshua MacDonald from Microsoft measure compute spent on pure format conversion versus value-generating processing in OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector pipelines, showing how these costs scale at terabyte scale. The session is for observability engineers and platform developers looking to optimize their telemetry pipeline costs.