Observational seismology has witnessed tremendous advances in the last two decades in Europe and worldwide. Current state-of-the-art permanent seismic monitoring means dense deployments of modern broadband velocity and acceleration sensors, often co-located, writing on 24- or 26-bit digitisers, with continuous real-time streaming to data centres. Technological improvements have been accompanied by community developments of standards, protocols, strategies and software to ease and homogenise data acquisition, archival, dissemination and processing. The establishment of EIDA (http://orfeus-eu.org/data/eida/) marked a change of paradigm in seismic data dissemination in Europe. The EIDA federated infrastructure is accessible via standard web services, including those promoted by FDSN. The deployment of dense modern accelerometer networks has progressively blurred the boundary between broadband and strong-motion seismology. Geophysical site characterisation has become standard practice, and open databases have been created to host basic and advanced station metadata. In this dynamic landscape, ORFEUS (http://orfeus-eu.org/) carries out since more than 30 years its mandate to promote and coordinate waveform seismology in Europe through the collection, archival and distribution of seismic waveform data, metadata and closely-related derived products. ORFEUS services (http://orfeus-eu.org/data/) currently provide access to the waveforms acquired by ~ 10,000 stations in Pan-Europe, including dense temporary experiments, with strong emphasis on open data and high data quality. Contributing data to ORFEUS archives means long-term archival, state-of-the-art quality control, enhanced data access and usage. At the onset of a new era for observational seismology, characterised by the challenges posed by big data and the establishment of a coordinated governance of all European seismological services in EPOS Seismology, this session discusses the latest advances in seismological observation in Pan-Europe and the challenges ahead. This includes integration of different datasets like GPS, OBS and portable arrays. Focus is on, but not limited to the participants to ORFEUS, their hardware and software infrastructure, technical and scientific products. Contributions from other global / international / national agencies focused on observational seismology are welcome. This session facilitates seismological data discovery and promotes open data sharing and integration.