Data Lake

Definition

A data lake is a centralised storage repository that holds large amounts of raw data in its native format until it is needed. In the monitoring context, a data lake stores different types of telemetry data — logs, metrics, traces, and events — in a single location, enabling far richer correlation than data scattered across separate tools.

In depth

Traditional monitoring stacks silo each signal type in a different system: metrics in Prometheus, logs in Elasticsearch, traces in Jaeger. This fragmentation makes cross-signal correlation slow and error-prone. A telemetry data lake solves this by co-locating all signals under a single query engine, enabling engineers to pivot seamlessly from a latency spike in a trace to the correlated log line to the underlying infrastructure metric — all in one query. obseria.io's Grail-inspired unified storage provides exactly this: a single store for all telemetry, queryable with a unified query language.

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