GrafanaCON 2025: Apply to speak at our biggest community event!
GrafanaCON is our biggest community conference of the year, and the GrafanaCON organizers have been hard at work shaping our annual event. We’re excited to see you all in person in Seattle on May 6-8, but what we would really love to see is many of you on the GrafanaCON stage.
The open source community is at the heart of this event, so it’s only fitting that we’re dedicating a large part of the GrafanaCON agenda to spotlight talks from the community.
If you’re interested in presenting your Grafana dashboard or walking through a demo, please apply to speak at GrafanaCON via our CFP process.
What speakers can expect at GrafanaCON 2025
This year, our annual conference will be bigger and better than ever, with a unique conference space, hands-on workshops, live demos, and, of course, community-led sessions focused on your favorite visualization tool, our big tent data sources, and the surrounding open source ecosystem — Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry, Mimir, and more.
We’re looking for speakers to share their real-world experiences with Grafana, from quirky and unexpected use cases to cool dashboards to custom-built plugins and more.
All talks will be given in-person in Seattle, and speakers will have support from the Grafana Labs team to fine-tune presentations and prepare to share their use case with hundreds of eager observability peers. Speakers also receive free entry to the three-day event, an invitation to a super fun VIP gathering, and GrafanaCON event swag.
Who should apply
We’re looking for open source contributors and hands-on practitioners to share their stories with the broader community. We’re open to a wide range of topics aimed at everyone from dashboard beginners to seasoned observability experts and we welcome speakers from all backgrounds and industries.
You don’t have to be an expert to give a great talk. If you have a project to share, you are qualified to speak alongside other Grafana enthusiasts. What we love to see most is a proposal that reflects your excitement for a topic.
Take it from one of the GrafanaCON co-chairs: “I am most excited about people getting a chance to present something they’re passionate about, but they’re not necessarily classed as professionals in," said Mihaela Maior, Director of Engineering at Grafana Labs.
What topics to submit for GrafanaCON
Feeling ready to present? Fantastic! There are two types of proposals we’re looking for:
- Lightning talks (10 minutes): A high-impact presentation on a powerful idea or challenging project.
- Use case stories (25 minutes): A deep dive into a complex topic, focusing on actionable insights for the audience. A Q&A session will take place after the presentation.
If you need some inspiration, check out our list of memorable Grafana dashboards of 2024 to find some of the wide-ranging projects that popped up last year.
One of our favorite dashboards presented at last year’s GrafanaCON was used to monitor and analyze bird songs.
Grafana Labs Software Engineers Ivana Huckova and Sven Großmann used an inexpensive microphone, a Raspberry Pi 4, plus open source tools like BirdNET (an AI-powered bird sound recognition framework), Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and Grafana to monitor and analyze bird tweets and chirps. They also set up alerts so they would know when a favorite species was detected.
Another superstar Grafana dashboard from GrafanaCON 2024 addressed a simple problem: monitoring your morning commute.
Ruben Fernandez, an SRE based in Atlanta, won the Golden Grot award in the personal dashboard category for his Grafana dashboard that helps him navigate his daily trip to the office, including when to leave and which mode of transportation to take.
He used APIs and GTFS real-time feeds to pull in data from weather.gov and the Metropolitan Atlanta Transit Authority, as well as drive-time and traffic information from Google Maps and Bing Maps. He also used a Prometheus instrumentation library for Python to combine metrics and send them to Grafana Cloud.
But CFP judges look for more than just quirky Grafana dashboards. That amazing dashboard you hacked together for your job could be a winner, too.
“I get most excited when different projects interact with each other. So when multiple projects can naturally form a bond and get better together," said Carl Bergquist, Grafana Labs Principal Engineer and a GrafanaCON co-chair. “Whenever silos of knowledge interact with each other and form a better view of something, that makes me happy.”
Above all, it’s the love of open source and the creative ways OSS is used in our daily lives that will always stand out.
“I really like the funky [use cases]. When someone comes in to show us monitoring the humidity around their plants or doing something interesting with their sourdough starters, that’s very special," said Mihaela. “It’s such a unique way to use the tools that are typically classed as professional.”
Tips for first-time speakers
People who are new to public speaking are more than welcome at GrafanaCON! We encourage submissions from new speakers and those from underrepresented groups.
“Talks from creators and experts are great, but talks from people who’re just learning a technology are also valuable,” writes software engineer Holly Cummins, in one of our favorite blogs about public speaking, So You Want to Speak at Conferences?
If you are new to conference speaking and (understandably) nervous to speak in front of hundreds of people, there are ways to get started. Start with a project demo in front of friendly colleagues, or present your work to another team in your company. (Holly Cummins calls this a Speaker Ladder, an approachable method to get started with conference speaking.)
If your talk is accepted, prepare your content long in advance, and seek the help of colleagues and event organizers. For GrafanaCON, our teams will be supporting you throughout the conference experience. Confidence comes from being well prepared, knowing your content is in tip-top shape and having positive feedback from the organizers.
What are you waiting for?
Now is as good a time as any to submit your CFP application, which will close on Jan. 30.
Our panel of CFP reviewers wear many hats in the event planning process (and they have new features to ship!). While the GrafanaCON CFP team members love this job, be kind and consider how they will receive your submission.
“Don’t wait until the last day to apply,” said Mihaela. “It makes our jobs harder as judges!”
The best first step is to simply get started: You can draft your proposal and return to it when you’re ready to complete and submit.
We look forward to learning more about all the creative ways the community has solved problems or sparked new hobbies with Grafana and all the open source tools in our ecosystem. And we can’t wait to celebrate your incredible stories together at GrafanaCON this year.
