Simon Willison Tests Parseable with Datasette for OpenTelemetry Traces

Parseable Meets Datasette

Simon Willison has published a TIL (Today I Learned) post on his weblog describing how he connected Parseable, a new observability tool, with Datasette to store and query OpenTelemetry traces. The post, dated 6th October 2026, documents the patterns that worked for the setup.

What Is Parseable?

Parseable is a new observability platform compatible with OpenTelemetry, designed for storing and querying observability data. Willison first encountered it through a Show HN post. The project offers an open source AGPL-licensed Rust implementation distributed as a single roughly 180MB binary, alongside an Enterprise version with extra features and a cloud hosted option.

Datasette Gains OpenTelemetry Support

The experiment became possible after Datasette 1.0a41 added OpenTelemetry support, a contribution credited to Alex Garcia. Willison then used Codex to work out how to run Parseable locally and feed it traces generated by Datasette.

Result

The resulting TIL, described as human written, shares the working configuration patterns. Willison also published a screenshot showing a Datasette trace displayed inside Parseable's localhost web application, confirming the two tools can be combined for local observability workflows.

Sources: Simonwillison