Unlocking Semantic Search & Observability: Dense Vectors + OTel in Elastic

Join us on Wednesday, February 26th, at Improving for an Elastic Minneapolis User Group meetup. We'll have presentations on Semantic Search and Open Telemetry, followed by networking, pizza, and refreshments.

Thank you to Improving for hosting our meetup. Improving is a modern digital services consulting firm focused on solving business problems with innovative technical solutions.

We're also joined by the team at Constellation Fund, who will share a few words on their organization at the beginning of the meetup.

More on The Constellation Fund -
The Constellation Fund is built to turn good intentions into great results. We use the best available evidence to invest in the fight against poverty. We conduct rigorous benefit-cost analyses to better understand the projected impact of poverty alleviation programs. Our best-in-class quantitative analysis is matched with on-the-ground community insights in order to find, fund, and empower poverty-fighting nonprofits creating transformational impacts across the Twin Cities.

⚡️ Interested in giving a talk? ⚡️
Are you interested in presenting your Elastic use case? We welcome 5-10 minute lightning talks, 45-minute deep dives, and everything in between. If you're interested, please send us an email at olivia@elastic.co.

📅 Date and Time:
Wednesday, February 26th, from 5:00-7:00 pm CST

📍Location:
Improving Minneapolis: 1515 Central Ave NE #100, Minneapolis, MN 55413

🚗 Parking:
Upon arrival, please navigate to the back of the building where there is a large free parking lot.

🪧 Arrival Instructions:
If arriving from the back parking lot, enter the building from the back door (it will look like a warehouse entrance). There will be signage to make it easy to find and navigate. Walk down the hallway and then you will enter the office space through the basketball court. The Improving team will be there to greet attendees.

📝Agenda:

• 5:00 pm: Doors open; say hi and eat some food
• 5:15 pm: An overview of The Constellation Fund - Chris Wentzlaff & Jose Diaz
• 5:25 pm: Unified Observability with OTel and the Elastic Stack - Andrew Cholakian (Principal Software Engineer II at Elastic)
• 6:00 pm: Uncomplicated Semantic Search - Brian Nemanic (Software Engineer)
• 6:15 pm: Networking & refreshments
• 7:00 pm: Event ends

💭 Talk Abstracts:
Uncomplicated Semantic Search - Brian Nemanic (Software Engineer)
A brief walkthrough of how to implement simple semantic search using dense vectors in Elasticsearch. Improve your searches with more relevant and insightful results that keyword searches might miss. The methods shown in this demo can be used with any license level in Elasticsearch, although we will briefly cover available licensed features as well.

Unified Observability with OTel and the Elastic Stack - Andrew Cholakian (Principal Software Engineer II at Elastic)
Learn how to use Open Telemetry, the premier open project for observability, to monitor your Kubernetes clusters using the Elastic stack. In this talk we'll work through setting up OTel for the Elastic Stack in Kubernetes. The talk will cover the OTel Kubernetes operator, auto-instrumentation and more. Followed by a brief demo of how you can use this collected data to analyze real problems using the Elastic stack.