All Along the Watchtower: Achieving the Trinity of Observability in Cloud with DiTing

Zhenyu Ren and Shuzhi Feng, Alibaba Group; Erci Xu, Shanghai Jiaotong University; Changsheng Niu, Haoyu Mao, Beibei Wang, Chong Gao, Zhenshan Zhang, Xinrui Yu, Jiangwei Huang, Jiesheng Wu, and Hong Tang, Alibaba Group

Observability is crucial for diagnosing and troubleshooting cloud systems as they grow in scale and complexity. However, telemetry data are often stored and processed in siloed systems, leading to high latency, redundant data movement, and low operational efficiency. To address these challenges, we present DiTing, an observability framework that unifies the storage and processing of heterogeneous telemetry data, including logs, metrics, and traces. The key idea of DiTing is to harvest underutilized cloud resources for cost-effective processing while relying on centralized storage systems for reliable data persistence and failover. We have deployed DiTing in production at scale, and DiTing can achieve sub-second data ingestion, high-throughput query processing, and up to 65× lower CapEx than existing solutions.

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King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST)

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {318658,
author = {Zhenyu Ren and Shuzhi Feng and Erci Xu and Changsheng Niu and Haoyu Mao and Beibei Wang and Chong Gao and Zhenshan Zhang and Xinrui Yu and Jiangwei Huang and Jiesheng Wu and Hong Tang},
title = {All Along the Watchtower: Achieving the Trinity of Observability in Cloud with {DiTing}},
booktitle = {20th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 26)},
year = {2026},
isbn = {978-1-939133-55-7},
address = {Seattle, WA},
pages = {2501--2514},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/osdi26/presentation/ren},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = jul
}