Observability Summit North America 2026

Today, observability platforms can process massive volumes of telemetry, but practitioners struggle to determine what matters during incidents, unnecessarily increasing usage bills.

This talk resolves the question: “Which telemetry data should we keep?” Learn how one team achieved 30% log reduction by flipping the script and asking “what did we actually use?” instead of “what should we collect?” They conducted a forensic audit of incident resolutions to find receipts proving which data sources truly mattered.

You’ll learn techniques for tracing backward from resolved incidents to identify which telemetry is deemed valuable and see how to map incidents to telemetry data that enabled resolution, revealing which sources proved critical, redundant, or unused.

Using OpenTelemetry (OTel) and Vector, an open-source tool for building fast and scalable observability pipelines, this approach provides a replicable pattern that the community can adapt across different environments.

You’ll leave with a framework for measuring telemetry value based on usage patterns, plus a repeatable audit process. The key question: “Where are the receipts?”