Query logs and traces with SQL in Observability Analytics
Google Cloud has rebranded Log Analytics as Observability Analytics, adding general availability for trace data querying and a new Observability API. The platform lets developers and SREs run SQL queries that JOIN logs and distributed trace spans in a single place, powered by BigQuery under the hood. Key use cases include analyzing AI agent tool failure rates and P95 latency across millions of spans, correlating trace data with application logs to identify which customers experience the worst performance, and joining observability data with business metrics in BigQuery. The Observability API enables programmatic management of observability buckets and allows AI agents or analytical workloads to query telemetry directly via BigQuery APIs. Concrete SQL query examples are provided for both AI agent optimization and customer latency analysis scenarios.