“Anything that emits data can be instrumented and observed.”
That’s the mindset that started this little experiment.
The Curiosity Behind It
Over the years, I’ve worked closely with customers to design IT solutions that are scalable, secure, and cost-effective. I’ve partnered with them on their cloud migration and digital transformation journeys, enabling full-stack Observability across their cloud and on-premise systems.
One day, I found myself looking at the appliances in my own home — the dishwasher, washer, dryer, and refrigerator — and realized that they, too, were generating valuable data. What if I could observe them? What if the same principles that power enterprise telemetry could help me understand my home appliances — their patterns, behavior, and efficiency?
That curiosity became the seed for this experiment: IoT Observability at home, powered by OpenTelemetry - EDOT, and Agent Builder.
Building the IoT Observability Foundation
The idea was simple:
- Treat every device as a data source.
- Use OpenTelemetry to capture signals
- Use EDOT (Elastic Distribution of OpenTelemetry) as a unified collector and exporter.
- Send all data to an Elastic Serverless Observability cluster.
- Layer Agent Builder on top, to talk to the data using natural language.
So now, my dishwasher, washer, dryer and refrigerator — all part of an Elastic-powered, home-scale telemetry pipeline.
Turning Signals into Stories
Technical overview: What does this system do?
I set up a system that connects my LG ThinQ smart appliances — washer, dryer, dishwasher, and refrigerator — to Home Assistant, turning everyday household devices into observable systems by sending metrics, logs, and traces to Elastic Cloud Serverless.
Key Capabilities:
✅ Natural language queries (Agent Builder)
✅ Real-time appliance state monitoring
✅ Anomaly detection
✅ Full stack observability stack
Architecture overview
The Aha Moment
What is Agent Builder?
Agent Builder provides an out-of-the-box conversational agent to allow you to immediately start chatting with any data in Elasticsearch (or from external sources through integrations) with a full experience built in Kibana and accessible via API. Developers can also customize their tools to search specific indexes or use ES|QL for business logic, relevance tuning, or personalization.
It has the ability to transform natural language into intuitive, piped, multi-step ES|QL, giving the agent the power to do analytical and hybrid semantic search. Finally, developers can compose custom Agents based on a set of user defined instructions and configurable set of available tools, and these Agents can be interacted with via chat in Kibana or via APIs, MCP and A2A.
Agent Builder creates a transformative experience, turning raw telemetry into an interactive dialogue. So instead of building complex queries manually, I can simply ask:
"Can you show me a report for all my appliances?" …and voilà, I get the insights right in Kibana.
Conclusion
This experiment reminded me that Observability isn’t limited to enterprise systems. Anything that emits data, whether it’s a Kubernetes pod or a coffee maker, has insights that can be uncovered. It could be any IoT devices for that matter, your data center thermostat, your office building badge scanners — all emit telemetry that can be valuable to ensuring safe and efficient operations. The same principles that help organizations gain visibility into production workloads can also bring insights, efficiency, and a sense of connection to the systems around us every day.
By combining OpenTelemetry (EDOT), Elastic Cloud Serverless, and Agent Builder, I realized how simple it can be to go from raw telemetry to conversation — turning metrics into meaning and data into dialogue.
This experiment showed me something simple yet profound: Observability is no longer just about dashboards and alerts; it’s about conversations. When data becomes conversational, insights become accessible to everyone — not just developers or SREs, but anyone curious enough to ask “why?”
Anything that emits data can be observed.
Now, with Agent Builder:
Anything that emits data can also answer back.