Dive into the GrafanaCON 2026 agenda: technical talks, hands-on learning, and community connections
The GrafanaCON 2026 agenda is live, packed with major announcements, technical deep dives, and real-world success stories from the OSS community, spanning everything from LEGOs to livestock.
Join us in Barcelona, 20-22 April, for GrafanaCON 2026, our annual community conference focused on all things Grafana and its extended open source ecosystem. This year’s agenda features all the content and activities our community has grown to love about GrafanaCON, including deep-dive talks on Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki, Mimir, and Tempo; our popular Ask the Experts booths; hands-on labs; and the annual Golden Grot Awards ceremony.
Plus, the Science Fair and Birds of a Feather discussions offer opportunities to make new connections and discoveries with your fellow community members. You’ll also be able to try Grafana Assistant to build Grafana dashboards, run queries, and give feedback to the teams behind our actually useful AI.
Here are a few highlights so you can start planning your GrafanaCON 2026 experience today.
GrafanaCON 2026 agenda: technical talks
GrafanaCON begins on 20 April with a series of hands-on labs (separate ticket required), where you can:
- Build and manage dashboards at scale
- Use AI to simplify plugin development
- Create telemetry pipelines with OpenTelemetry and Prometheus
- Learn best practices for proactive reliability testing
- …. and more.
From there, we’ll dive into two days of technical talks led by both Grafana Labs experts and members of our OSS community. Below are some highlights; to see the full line-up of sessions, please refer to the GrafanaCON agenda.
A hands-on lab at last year's GrafanaCON.
From the Grafana Labs team
Join co-chairs Carl Bergquist, Mihaela Maior, and Richard “RichiH” Hartmann for the official kickoff of GrafanaCON 2026. Grafana Labs CEO/Co-founder Raj Dutt and Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard will celebrate the year’s highlights, while the engineering team shares exciting updates on our open source projects and unveils what’s new in Grafana 13.
Get an inside look at Grafana 13 and the most impactful updates across the platform. In this session, Grafana team members walk through improvements that make it easier to operate Grafana at scale, build powerful flexible dashboards, and leverage the latest capabilities to get to insights faster.
Context is everything: Building AI agents you can steer
AI agents are only as powerful as the context they receive. In this session, Grafana Labs engineers share lessons from building Grafana Assistant and offer practical tips for bringing the right context to get the most out of AI agents.
Alloy’s OpenTelemetry engine: What's new and what's next
Grafana Labs engineers introduce Alloy’s new OpenTelemetry Engine. Learn how to configure Alloy using standard OpenTelemetry Collector YAML and enable native OpenTelemetry pipelines integrated with Grafana.
Inside Loki’s new architecture for faster log insights at petabyte scale
Check out all the new functionality in Loki that enables higher performance and scalability at massive log volumes.
The latest in Grafana Alerting: One alert engine to rule them all
Grafana Alerting is evolving into a powerful, unified engine. The Grafana Alerting team highlights new features that reduce response time and show how to configure multiple notification policy trees to better manage observability across large, multi-team systems.
Grafana Labs CTO Tom Wilkie on stage at last year's GrafanaCON event.
From the community
Community voices are a cornerstone of all GrafanaCON events. This year, members of our open source community will share inspiring use cases, from modernizing a 180-year-old railway operator to monitoring oceans to protect marine life. Here’s just a sampling of the projects that showcase our community-driven innovation. For the full list of user-led sessions, please check out the agenda.
Using advanced robotics, AI-powered analytics, and unified data observability pipelines with Grafana, DIGI4ECO built a 4D ecological monitoring system that turns complex ocean data into actionable restoration strategies. Jacopo Aguzzi, a senior research scientist, and Enoc Martinez, an electronic engineering professor, discuss how DIGI4ECO created a physical twin of the ocean.
Using the Grafana Foundation SDK, Lorenzo Setale and Paul Farver helped The LEGO Group build a Dashboard Framework that lets users define what data matters. Learn how platform engineers can empower teams to create insightful, actionable dashboards anyone can use.
How the Python Software Foundation uses Grafana to protect and scale community infrastructure
The Python Software Foundation runs critical infrastructure that serves millions of developers worldwide. In this session, Infrastructure Engineer Jacob Coffee shares how the PSF uses Grafana, Alloy, and Loki to monitor distributed services and maintain the reliability and security of the Python ecosystem at scale.
All aboard: How Irish Rail built an intelligent railway monitoring platform with Grafana
How do you modernize the monitoring system of a 180-year-old railway operator responsible for 2,400 kilometers of track? In this session, Richard Donovan, a technology consultant and architect, explains how Irish Rail built an open, scalable IIoT platform that reduces safety risks and lays the foundation for AI-driven operational intelligence.
Other GrafanaCON 2026 agenda highlights
In addition to the technical deep-dives and community-led sessions, we have a ton of other fun events in store for GrafanaCON 2026 that you don’t want to miss. These include:
- Community Garden Party: Join us for sunset conversations, new connections, and to plant seeds for future collaboration across the open source community.
- GrafanaCON Science Fair: Explore fun hackathon projects and unexpected Grafana setups, including a ping-pong table that maps ball trajectories, a planespotting station visualizing aircraft movements, and more.
- Birds of a Feather: Join us to explore the topics you care about in small, intimate group discussions with your fellow community members.
- Ask the Experts booth: Bring your technical questions, use cases, and dashboards to connect directly with the people behind Grafana, Loki, OpenTelemetry, and more.
- The Golden Grot Awards: We celebrate the amazing Grafana dashboards our community creates and recognize the top dashboards in two categories (personal and professional).
Join us in Barcelona in April
GrafanaCON is where open observability meets the people building it.
If you use Grafana or its extended OSS ecosystem, contribute to open source, or want to see how others are turning signals into action, this is the place to be.
The countdown to GrafanaCON 2026 has begun! Register today and secure your spot in Barcelona.
