OpenTelemetry

OpenTelemetry support creates a managed opentelemetry catalog for logs and traces. Use it when you want application observability data to live next to product analytics, operational data, and business context in the same lakehouse.

Once enabled for an environment, Altertable accepts OTLP/HTTP protobuf exports and writes records into queryable tables:

The tables are partitioned by event time and sorted for common service and trace lookups. You can query them with the same SQL engine, dashboards, insights, and agents you use for other catalogs.

Enable OpenTelemetry

1. Open Catalogs in the target environment.
2. Find OpenTelemetry in the new catalog options.
3. Turn on the OpenTelemetry catalog.
4. Configure your OpenTelemetry collector or SDK to export traces and logs to Altertable.

OpenTelemetry is enabled per environment. Each environment gets its own managed catalog and credentials boundary.

OTLP Endpoints

Send OTLP/HTTP protobuf data to the standard paths on api.altertable.ai:

Authenticate with the same HTTP Basic Auth credentials used by the Lakehouse REST API. You can find those credentials in the Credentials section for the environment.

Query Examples

Find slow spans by service:

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SELECT
  service_name,
  name,
  duration_ns / 1000000.0 AS duration_ms,
  start_time
FROM opentelemetry.main.spans
WHERE start_time >= now() - INTERVAL '1 day'
ORDER BY duration_ns DESC
LIMIT 50;

Join logs to traces:

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SELECT
  logs.timestamp,
  logs.severity_text,
  logs.body,
  spans.name AS span_name
FROM opentelemetry.main.logs logs
LEFT JOIN opentelemetry.main.spans spans
  ON logs.trace_id = spans.trace_id
 AND logs.span_id = spans.span_id
WHERE logs.service_name = 'api'
ORDER BY logs.timestamp DESC
LIMIT 100;

When to Use It

Use the OpenTelemetry catalog when you want to:

• analyze traces and logs with SQL
• correlate application behavior with product events or business data
• build dashboards over service-level signals
• give agents governed access to operational context during investigations

For metrics, continue using your existing metrics backend until Altertable exposes a metrics table for OpenTelemetry data.