Shaping the future of open source observability with the OpenSearch Observability TAG
OpenSearch is helping developers gain the visibility they need into their applications and infrastructure, making it easier to monitor, debug, and optimize systems. With its powerful search capabilities and flexible design, it has become a go-to choice for handling observability data like logs, metrics, and traces. This success is backed by a vibrant open-source community and rapidly expanding ecosystem of 50+ solution providers and partners.
The platform’s growth metrics reflect this widespread adoption and community engagement. The project has achieved over 1 billion downloads, with contributions from more than 1,000 developers across 30+ organizations and expansion to over 140 GitHub repositories. With this growing array of components in the OpenSearch stack, which cater for observability use case as well as other use cases such as search, security, and AI/ML workflows, there’s been a growing need for an end-to-end technical view on observability across the stack, to guide a unified, cost-effective observability solution that natively integrates with the expanding ecosystem and that adheres to evolving standards such as OpenTelemetry.
Building on this momentum and our community’s growing needs, the OpenSearch Project is excited to announce the creation of the Observability Technical Advisory Group (TAG). This new group, established under the Technical Steering Committee, will provide strategic direction and technical guidance to further strengthen observability solutions within the OpenSearch ecosystem. The Observability TAG has held its inaugural meeting on September 2, 2025, with participants from AWS, SAP, Apple and Hilti. The group also includes members from other organizations such as Uber and Paessler, representing a broad cross-section of the observability community.
The purpose of the Observability TAG is to define, advocate for, and spread best practices that help users effectively implement OpenSearch for ingesting, storing and visualizing different telemetry signals. The group will advise the Technical Steering Committee on observability related initiatives and ensure OpenSearch aligns with open standards, interoperability, industry trends, and community needs. You can read the full TAG charter here.
The Observability TAG will focus on several key areas, including:
- Providing technical guidance for observability applications using OpenSearch, including storage for metrics, logs, traces, and profiles; ingestion pipelines; visualization; dashboards; and plugins such as alerting and anomaly detection.
- Aligning OpenSearch observability initiatives with industry trends, CNCF observability guidelines and interoperability standards by collaborating with external projects such as OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Jaeger, and Fluent Bit.
- Establishing best practices for OpenSearch observability deployments, encompassing ingestion pipelines, alerting, visualization, and operational monitoring, while fostering community growth and adoption.
Membership and participation
The initial members of the Observability TAG are Orcun Berkem (Amazon), Michael Froh (Uber), Yupeng Fu (Uber), Shenoy Pratik Gurudatt (Amazon), Dotan Horovits (Amazon), Jonah Kowall (Paessler), Karsten Schnitter (SAP), Mikhail Stepura (Apple), Jürgen Walter (SAP), and Shuyi Zhang (Uber).
Participation in the TAG is open to the community, and meetings are public. Anyone interested can attend meetings to share perspectives and ideas. You don’t need to be a member of the TAG to contribute or help. But if you are interested in becoming a member, here is how you can get involved
All participants are expected to adhere to the OpenSearch Software Foundation’s Code of Conduct and TAG operational guidelines to maintain a respectful and inclusive environment.
Get involved
The Observability TAG is a community effort, and we welcome your participation:
- Review the TAG’s governance charter
- Join the OpenSearch Slack and participate in the
#observabilitychannel - Attend the Observability TAG meetings to share your input
- Join the OpenSearch forum under the
observabilitycategory
We are passionate about open source observability and look forward to advancing it together with the community. Watch for updates from the Observability TAG and join us.
