The Speed of Metrics, the Fidelity of Traces: Architecting Post-Collection Aggregation - Zack Owens

This advanced talk from New Relic's Zack Owens addresses the observability scalability paradox where organizations generate petabytes of traces and logs but cannot efficiently query historical high-fidelity telemetry. The presenter introduces post-collection aggregation as an alternative to traditional pre-aggregation at the collector level, enabling engineers to ask new questions about historical data without collector configuration changes. The session covers incremental view materialization techniques for time-series data, aimed at platform engineers, SREs, and observability architects dealing with high-volume telemetry.