On September 17, AWS OpenSearch will conduct a live demonstration featuring Piped Processing Language (PPL) alerting functionality alongside a newly unified Alert Manager, with an interactive question-and-answer segment tailored for site reliability engineers and platform engineers managing observability infrastructure.
Operating as a top-level open-source initiative within the Linux Foundation ecosystem and supported by Amazon Web Services alongside other industry contributors, OpenSearch provides an integrated observability platform. The OpenSearch Observability Stack consolidates AI agent tracing, application performance monitoring, service topology visualization, log aggregation, metrics collection, and visualization capabilities into a single, open-source environment built on OpenTelemetry standards. The platform incorporates machine learning-driven anomaly detection and introduces the new Piped Processing Language (PPL).
Joshua Bright, senior product manager at AWS OpenSearch, will lead the technical presentation aimed at site reliability engineers and platform engineers deploying observability solutions at enterprise scale, where alerting systems frequently represent a critical failure point.
Addressing the observability tooling gap
While organizations generate substantial volumes of telemetry data, the tooling designed to act upon that data has not evolved proportionally, creating an expanding disparity. The situation intensifies as artificial intelligence agents introduce additional high-volume signals into monitoring systems. According to the Linux Foundation, 77% of organizations have already incorporated OpenSearch as either a primary or supporting element within their AI infrastructure, with agent tracing cited as a key driver.
Traditional query languages designed around basic threshold conditions struggle when handling correlation across multiple signals. Alert rule definitions proliferate across fragmented platforms, and on-call personnel invest disproportionate effort in eliminating false positive alerts rather than addressing genuine incidents.
New alerting capabilities
To bridge this capability gap, the OpenSearch development team is introducing two complementary features: Piped Processing Language (PPL) for alerting operations, and a centralized Alert Manager interface.
PPL adapts the familiar Unix pipeline paradigm to observability query construction, enabling engineers to apply filtering, data transformation, and correlation operations across logs, metrics, and traces using intuitive, readable command syntax.
By composing sequential operations in the manner of terminal command chaining, PPL enables the construction of multi-step alert conditions capable of identifying subtle failure patterns—for instance, a performance degradation in an AI agent's tool invocation that becomes significant only when concurrent log error rates also increase. Since PPL competencies transfer seamlessly across search, analytics, and alerting contexts, previously intractable alert conditions become manageable to construct and transfer among team members.
Centralized alert management and open licensing
Complementing PPL, the new Alert Manager furnishes teams with a unified control plane for administering alert rules, configuring routing paths, implementing suppression policies, and managing escalation workflows. This ensures that documented alerting procedures align with actual incident response operations. All functionality presented during this session is distributed under the Apache 2.0 license with unrestricted feature availability.
The webinar agenda encompasses a practical demonstration of both capabilities operating against a production-representative observability scenario, followed by an unrestricted question-and-answer period. Participants are encouraged to bring specific alerting challenges for discussion with the Amazon team. Registration is available for the session scheduled for 12 p.m. Eastern/9 a.m. Pacific on Thursday, September 17.
Source: The New Stack