Grafana Labs at KubeCon Japan 2026

Featured in the Project Lightning Talks: Jul 29 • 12:38-12:40 • F3 | 313+314 OpenTelemetry (OTel) has become the industry standard for observability. In this session, we will highlight how OTel is shaping the future of observability with architectural, protocol, and ecosystem updates aimed at handling complex cloud-native environments and cutting-edge agentic systems. We will touch upon key initiatives in OTel including GenAI observability with standardized semantic conventions and instrumentation, high cardinality support with Arrow and dynamic configurations, profiling signal support and OTel Blueprints. Join in to learn about what’s in progress and what’s coming! Session details: https://kubecon-cloudnativecon-japan-2026.sessionize.com/session/1283896

Jul 29 • 16:30-17:00 JST • 5F | 501 Vulnerability management is an evolving topic that was hard pre-coding agents and can now become overwhelming for security and authentication teams. Add to that multi-version support, multi-tenancy and separate deployment waves and you have the recipe for an unmitigated headache. Join Grafana’s journey in this topic as we deep dive into how we handled CVE-2023-3128 three years ago and how we handle vulnerability classification and patch distribution, from our cloud environment to millions of Grafana instances worldwide, today. You’ll learn how to distinguish between a vulnerability and an intended feature, how to orchestrate the rollout of a vulnerability patch and how to remain transparent to your community of users without placing their deployments at risk. When maintainers face increasing pressure from a high volume of pull requests and AI-generated vulnerability reports, there is a critical need to refine and advance our security practices. Session details: https://kubecon-cloudnativecon-japan-2026.sessionize.com/session/1193847

Featured in the Keynote: Jul 30 • 09:47-09:50 JST • 1F | Main Hall Seven years after the unification of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, OpenTelemetry celebrates its CNCF graduation—having successfully conquered production security and scale, stabilized semantic conventions, and unified all four core data signals into a single interoperable fabric. As OpenTelemetry enters its next frontier, we are thrilled to unveil a new era of intelligent observability—propelling native support for Agentic AI, high-efficiency OTel-Arrow transport, continuous profiling, and smart, entity-driven sampling. Come celebrate and join in to build the next generation of open-source observability. Session details: https://kubecon-cloudnativecon-japan-2026.sessionize.com/session/1283189

Jul 30 • 15:50-16:20 JST • 1F | Main Hall When we started building an AI assistant for observability, we thought the hard part would be making it smart. We were wrong. The hard part was knowing when to trust it. AI agents hallucinate, forget context, and confidently give wrong answers. Traditional testing doesn't catch these failures. What's needed is evaluation grounded in systematic doubt. This talk shares lessons from shipping an AI agent to production: how to build a golden dataset of use cases you must get right, how to use LLM-as-judge when there's no ground truth, and how to use OpenTelemetry traces to debug eval failures. You'll also hear what's still unsolved: evaluating multi-agent handoffs and closing the feedback loop between what users ask and what your evals cover. Kyoto School philosopher Nishitani Keiji called this "The Great Doubt" (大疑): questioning every assumption until only what survives is real. For AI agents, that's not philosophy. It's the job. Session details: https://kubecon-cloudnativecon-japan-2026.sessionize.com/session/1192171

Jul 30 • 16:30-17:00 JST • 3F | 315 Prometheus exporters are typically consumed as scrape targets. But what changes when they can be embedded directly into custom OpenTelemetry Collector distributions built with the OpenTelemetry Collector Builder (OCB)? This session explores how that shift creates a new operational model for observability teams, platform engineers, and users who rely on Prometheus exporters today. Instead of treating exporters only as external endpoints, teams can run them as Collector components and integrate them more directly into telemetry pipelines. The talk also examines an important ecosystem question this model brings into focus: how to expose semantic convention-compatible telemetry from Prometheus exporters. Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of what this approach unlocks, where Prometheus exporters and Collector receivers overlap, and what this means for the future of interoperability between the two communities. Session details: https://kubecon-cloudnativecon-japan-2026.sessionize.com/session/1189149