OpenObserve — Questions

Open and answered questions about OpenObserve.

Open Questions

• What is the maximum tested ingestion rate in a real production environment? → Community reports needed
• How does DataFusion performance compare to ClickHouse for the same analytical queries? → Benchmark comparison needed
• What is the AGPL-3.0 impact for SaaS providers embedding OpenObserve? → Legal review needed
• How does compaction performance scale with 10,000+ streams? → Check GitHub issues
• Does OpenObserve support federated querying across multiple S3 buckets? → Check docs
• What is the WAL recovery behavior when an ingester crashes mid-flush? → Check code/docs

Answered Questions

• What is the storage format? → Apache Parquet with Zstd compression on S3/GCS/Azure. See observability/openobserve/architecture.
• Is OpenObserve a drop-in Elasticsearch replacement? → Partially — supports ES Bulk API for ingestion, but query API differs (SQL vs Lucene DSL).
• How does the 140x cost claim hold up? → Combines compression (~7x), storage tier (~4-5x), and replication savings (~2-3x). See observability/openobserve/benchmarks#Why 140x Cheaper.
• What query languages are supported? → SQL for logs/traces, PromQL for metrics. See observability/openobserve/index#Key Features.
• Can OpenObserve run as a single binary? → Yes, for dev/POC. Set ZO_LOCAL_MODE=true. See observability/openobserve/operations.