query-standardization.md

Query Standardization Working Group

A working group to research and analyze exising observability query languages with the goal of recommending a standard, unified language for following teams and projects to implement.

• Charter Document
• DRAFT Semantic Specification Document
• DRAFT Context Document

Mission

This working group will conduct research and analysis into various observability query languages and deliver a set of recommendations ready for a follow-up group or open source project to turn into an ad-hoc standard with a reference implementation. Research and analysis will incorporate information such as:

1. Common, uncommon and desired use cases across observability data
2. Input and output data models for query languages
3. Language design goals, caveats and examples mapped to use cases
4. Semantic details for language operations
5. Adoption, tooling and infrastructure around the DSLs
6. Survey end user sentiment regarding existing DSLs

Evaluation deliverables will be a set of documents including end-user surveys, interview notes, use cases, examples and semantic descriptions of query languages.

The standard query recommendation deliverables will include information on:

1. A document stating the design goals of a standard language along with benefits and trade-offs
2. Base data model definitions of observability data types to incorporate Semantic definitions of operations on observability data
3. A schema for query results of the various types
4. Recommended APIs for querying observability data
5. A recommended query syntax

Creating an ad-hoc standard and reference implementation using the recommendations as a spec is out of scope for this proposed working group under the Observability TAG charter. A follow-up group will be responsible for finalizing the standard and potentially creating implementations after the work of this group is complete.

How we communicate

• Chat: CNCF Slack #obs-query-standard-wg
• Meetings:
  • Meetings at 0400 UTC, 1st and 3rd Tuesdays of each month, same day as the Observability Tag.
  • Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/91486841153?pwd=TmxaczdPWXNna1BISDhLOVY0VjFidz09
  • See CNCF community calendar for invite links
  • Meeting Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pS6zhRXpP9HgqltW70595kRhC2idBo80MUMhHjKi5vM/
• Mailing List: [email protected] (join here)
  • Sharing the main Observability list.

Chairs (alphabetical order)

Name	Email	CNCF Slack	GitHub	Company	Open Source
Chris Larsen	[email protected]	@Chris Larsen	manolama	Netflix	OpenTSDB, Atlas
Vijay Samuel	[email protected]	@Vijay Samuel	vjsamuel	Ebay

Code of Conduct

We follow the CNCF's Code of Conduct.