Costa Tsaousis spoke at Conf42 DevOps 2024 on January 25 with a talk titled “Observability Standardization: the elephant is still in the room!” The event was virtual, so the audience was global.
The premise of the talk was blunt: the industry talks endlessly about open standards and protocol compatibility for observability, but the real question is whether we actually need custom monitoring solutions for every infrastructure scenario. OpenTelemetry, Prometheus exposition format, StatsD, SNMP – there is no shortage of standards. The problem is not the number of protocols. It is that the underlying data models, collection patterns, and retention strategies are so different across tools that “standardization” often just means another translation layer rather than true interoperability.
Costa argued that the focus should shift from protocol agreement to outcome agreement – what are we actually trying to see, and can we agree on that instead of fighting about wire formats? For Netdata, this is not an abstract question. The project auto-detects and collects from hundreds of sources using whatever protocol each one speaks, and the real work is in making that data useful, not in debating which format it arrives in.
