Name: The Invisible Tax: How Data Format Conversions Drive up Telemetry Pipeline Costs - Cijo Thomas, Microsoft
Start: 2026-06-18T16:10:00+0530
End: 2026-06-18T16:40:00+0530

18-19 June
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The Invisible Tax: How Data Format Conversions Drive up Telemetry Pipeline Costs - Cijo Thomas, Microsoft

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:10pm - 4:40pm IST

Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Telemetry travels long pipelines before reaching observability backends. While enrichment, filtering, and sampling provide clear diagnostic value, much of the compute cost comes from repeatedly converting telemetry between different data formats.

Telemetry flows through SDK representations, wire protocols, collector-internal formats, and backend ingestion schemas. Each boundary introduces marshaling, unmarshaling, and copying. These transformations add no new information, yet consume CPU and memory and scale linearly with data volume—creating a hidden “transform tax” that compounds at scale.

This talk presents measurements from instrumented OpenTelemetry SDK and Collector pipelines, quantifying compute spent on pure format conversion versus value-generating processing. Attendees will learn where conversion costs arise and explore strategies to reduce waste, including fewer representation hops, zero-copy techniques, and emerging approaches such as Apache Arrow-based layouts.

Speakers

Cijo Thomas

Principal Software Engineer, Microsoft

Cijo is a Software Engineer at Microsoft specializing in Observability. He has been deeply involved with the OpenTelemetry project since its inception and is a core maintainer for the OpenTelemetry .NET and OpenTelemetry Rust implementations. His expertise extends beyond OpenTelemetry... Read More →

Thursday June 18, 2026 4:10pm - 4:40pm IST
Lotus 2 (Level 3)

Observability

Content Experience Level Any

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon India 2026

Cijo Thomas

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