OpenSearch Project Vienna - Fall Meetup

The OpenSearch Project Vienna community is back for its fall edition! And the community keeps growing.

This time, the meetup is hosted by Exoscale and RISE, with support from Aiven and a special guest speaker from the Aiven team.

The evening will explore two increasingly important areas of the OpenSearch ecosystem:

• Developing effective security analytics using OpenSearch as a detection engineering platform

• Building intelligent search experiences with OpenSearch’s agentic search capabilities

Whether you work with search, observability, security analytics, AI applications, or data platforms, join us for practical technical sessions, discussions and networking.

All experience levels are welcome.

Exoscale is happy to host the evening with free drinks and snacks—just bring your curiosity and good vibes!

Agenda

• 6:00pm - 6:15pm - Open Doors & Welcome Notes
• 6:15pm - 7:00pm - Talk 1 (Paul Hager, Cert.at, David Riepl, RISE GmbH)
• 7:00pm - 7:30pm - Break (Drinks and Snacks)
• 7:30pm - 8:15pm - Talk 2 (Dima Kan, Aiven)
• 8:20pm - 9:00pm - Networking (Drinks and Snacks)

Location
A1 Telekom Austria AG
Lassallestraße 9, 1020 Wien, Austria
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Speakers and Sessions

Talk 1: Developing Effective Security Analytics with OpenSearch

This talk presents OpenSearch as a scalable detection engineering platform. We will demonstrate how Sigma rules can be developed, managed, and executed against security data, how detections can be mapped to the MITRE ATT&CK framework, and how we can validate whether those detections actually identify realistic adversary behavior.
The session also examines practical challenges of detection engineering like rule portability and false positive management, which makes the difference between having a detection rule and having an effective detection capability.

Paul Hager is a detection and security engineer at CERT.at, specializing in threat research and the development of practical security detections. He previously worked as a threat researcher and detection engineer, developing detection content for emerging threats.

David Riepl is a system engineer at RISE, specializing in product development for log analysis and security monitoring. With over 15 years of experience in the field of IT operations, he has developed expertise in designing and implementing highly available systems, and implementing comprehensive application and security monitoring strategies for complex IT environments.

Talk 2: Inside OpenSearch’s AI toolkit: From Vector Search to Agents

This talk takes a deep dive into how OpenSearch has evolved from a search and analytics engine into a full AI platform, covering:

• Machine learning: anomaly detection, in-cluster inference, learning to rank, and user behavior insights (UBI)
• AI-powered search: vector search, keyword search, hybrid search, and RAG pipelines built directly on OpenSearch
• Agents: orchestration, memory, and multi-turn conversations
• Search quality: agent-based tuning and the search relevance workbench
• Production readiness: scalability and cost-efficiency trade-offs of running these capabilities at scale

Dmitry “Dima” Kan is a product leader at Aiven, focusing on managed OpenSearch and AI-powered search technologies. A hands-on technology professional with a PhD in computer science, he combines expertise in software engineering, product management, search, machine learning, and large-scale data platforms. He is also the founder and host of the Vector Podcast, where he explores developments in search and artificial intelligence.