GrafanaCON 2026: Apply to speak at our biggest community event!
GrafanaCON, our biggest community event of the year, is taking place in beautiful Barcelona on April 20-22. The open source community is at the heart of this event, which is why a large part of the GrafanaCON agenda will spotlight community projects and use cases.
That’s where you come in.
If you’re interested in presenting your Grafana dashboard, demoing a plugin you’ve built, or showcasing a project you’re especially proud of, we’d love to see you on stage. Our CFP for GrafanaCON 2026 is open until January 19 — apply to speak today!
What speakers can expect at GrafanaCON 2026
GrafanaCON 2026 will include more than 20 talks and hands-on sessions related to Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki, Mimir, and other open source projects. The event also includes live demos, our Ask the Experts booth, the GrafanaCON Science Fair, and tons of one-of-kind networking opportunities to connect with fellow community members.
All talks will be delivered in person in Barcelona. Speakers will receive coaching and presentation support from the Grafana Labs team.
Who should apply to speak
We’re calling all open source contributors and hands-on practitioners to share their stories with the broader community.
We welcome speakers from all backgrounds and industries. You don’t need to be an expert to give a great talk. If you have a project you’re excited about and a story to tell, you’re qualified — and we’ll help you prepare to present.
What topics to submit for GrafanaCON
Last year, GrafanaCON user stories covered everything from monitoring moon landings to tracking laundry machines in a college dorm. We’re open to a wide range of topics, from beginner to advanced, and love proposals that reflect your curiosity, creativity, and passion for a topic.
There are three 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. Q&A session will take place after the presentation.
- Science Fair demo (new for 2026): For projects with an interactive or IoT component. Rather than being presented on stage, Science Fair demos are staffed in the expo hall for the duration of the event.
Tips to craft your submission
Want a little more guidance? Richard “RichiH” Hartmann, Senior Developer Programs Director at Grafana Labs, and Mihaela Maior, Director, Engineering at Grafana Labs — and both GrafanaCON co-chairs — recently shared some tips for submitting a talk:
- Think big: Be ambitious, and consider the kinds of talks you would like to attend at a conference.
- Keep it open and community-focused: Prioritize community and open source software.
- Be strategic with tech: Center your talk around core OSS technologies, such as Grafana, Prometheus, or OpenTelemetry.
- Make it collaborative (if you can): Talks with co-speakers from different organizations often stand out.
For more inspiration, you can also check out our top community dashboards of 2025, along with these previous GrafanaCON talks:
Loki at Dropbox: Strategies for reliable petabyte-scale logging
How do you manage logging at petabyte scale? In this session, Infrastructure Software Engineer Chris Hodges shared hard-won lessons from scaling Grafana Loki to manage multi-petabyte unstructured logs for 1,000+ services at Dropbox.
Hungry for data: Monitoring carnivorous plants with Grafana, Prometheus, and Loki
In this lightning talk, Jay Clifford, a developer advocate at Grafana Labs, shared his journey of applying observability practices to maintain a small carnivorous plant tank, turning his love for these fascinating plants into a data-driven passion project.
Dashboards to the moon: Grafana's role in Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission operations
On March 2, 2025, Firefly Aerospace became the first commercial company to complete a fully successful moon landing. Jesus Charles, Blue Ghost Mission 1 Flight Director, offered an inside look at the mission, the operations team, and the role Grafana played in monitoring spacecraft systems from low Earth orbit all the way to the moon’s surface.
Next steps
Join us in Slack (#cfp-speaker-office-hours) to brainstorm presentation ideas and get feedback from our developer advocates. If you have any questions, you can also reach out at speakers@grafana.com.
When you’re ready, submit your talk by January 19.
We look forward to learning more about how the community has solved real-world problems, or embraced new hobbies, with Grafana and other OSS tools. And we can't wait to celebrate your incredible stories together at GrafanaCON this year!
