Grafana Labs at KubeCon Europe 2026

Monday, March 23 | 12:45 - 13:20 CET • Observability Day

From OTLP to OTTL, engineers are excited about a lot of things. But there is one thing that excites them above all else and that is correcting people. Welcome to the second installment of “The Spec-tacular Game Show”.

In this fun game show our panelists will be given incorrect statements about the OpenTelemetry Specification or Semantic Conventions. The panelists will buzz in, identify what’s wrong, and state the correction. If none of the panelists know the answer the audience will get a chance to answer to steal the point. The panelist (or audience) with the most points wins!

After each question we will discuss why the specification is the way it is and highlight how it produces the production-quality telemetry you know and love. Join us for a fun, relaxing, (snarky) panel about everyone’s favorite part of Otel!

Monday, March 23 | 15:55 - 16:20 CET • KyvernoCon

The adoption of Kyverno solves the challenge of Policy-as-Code. However, a new question emerges for platform engineers: what happens when a slow policy rule adds latency? A slow admission webhook can degrade performance across the k8s cluster.

Tracing the webhook's lifecycle is the fastest way to pinpoint any bottlenecking rule.

The next step in your GitOps journey is to make your monitoring as declarative as your policies. In the live demo, you’ll learn how to monitor Kyverno's operational cycle using Prometheus, Tempo, and Grafana. We'll set SLOs and enable real-time alerts with observability as code, including metrics and alerts for policy failure rates or slow webhooks, and utilizing OpenTelemetry tracing to pinpoint what is causing a delay in the admission process.

If you manage policies as code, don't let silent performance bottlenecks threaten your cluster stability. Join to learn concrete steps needed to close your GitOps loop and achieve operational control over Kyverno.

Tuesday, March 24, 2026 | 15:15 - 15:45 CET • Observability

If you’ve ever spent hours fixing broken dashboards after a metric change or chasing down why an alert stopped firing, you’re not alone. The struggle of maintaining backward compatibility makes telemetry brittle, hard to trust, and difficult to evolve. The OpenTelemetry community has introduced the idea of Telemetry First, advanced by the Weaver project, where telemetry schemas are treated as first-class citizens. In this session, you will see how adopting a schema-driven approach can transform observability from an afterthought into a design principle.

The talk will cover two dimensions: manually defining schemas to bring order to new and existing telemetry, and exploring how runtime schema inference can accelerate adoption in complex, legacy platforms. Attendees will learn how Telemetry First enables automation of dashboards, alerts, and instrumentation clients; enforces data quality checks; powers contract testing; and establishes a living telemetry catalog with history and lineage.

Tuesday, March 24, 2026 | 16:15 - 16:45 CET • Observability

The “rate” function and its friends “increase” and “delta” are easily the most used (and probably also the most abused) functions in all of PromQL. Unsurprisingly, a lot of discussion has happened over the years about how to improve these functions. The Prometheus maintainers took a conservative approach here, much to the dismay of some. But finally things are moving, and there are now two new experimental modifiers in PromQL: “smoothed” and “anchored”. This session will not only explain how to use them and for what, it will also provide some context why it took so long and what triggered the recent changes.

Tuesday, March 24 | 17:00 - 17:30 CET • Maintainer Track, OpenTelemetry

Join us for the official project update OpenTelemetry session at KubeCon+CloudNativeCon. OpenTelemetry contributors have been working hard to evolve the project to be stable by default and simplify its usage. Governance Committee members will discuss these and other exciting improvements in the project since the last update in Atlanta. This session will also be your opportunity to engage with contributors and maintainers from across the project and get your questions answered!

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 | 14:15 - 14:45 CET • Cloud Native Novice

What do a raccoon, a goat, and a goose have in common? They all take part in this beginner-friendly session, where we’ll use OpenTelemetry and the Grafana observability stack to easily showcase a cloud-native observability scenario.

In this session, you’ll learn what distributed tracing is, why it’s incredibly helpful for understanding how requests flow through multi-service systems, and how it can reveal issues like latency and unexpected errors — alongside logs, metrics and profiles for a complete observability picture.

We’ll walk through a multi-service application that uses AI to generate animal facts and images, tracing each request from API call to OpenAI fact and image generation to database storage. Along the way, you’ll learn how to use OpenTelemetry to instrument Python and Java applications and visualize the full request journey using easy to understand, open-source dashboards for metrics, logs and traces.

If a goat can survive cloud-native observability, so can you.

Wednesday, March 25 | 16:00 - 17:15 CET • Contribfest, Prometheus

Prometheus is an extremely popular Open Source monitoring system, with over a million installations. The project relies entirely on volunteer contributions, with no commercial owner or enterprise version.

If you have recently made your first PR to Prometheus, or you would like to know more about the process, come along! We will walk through one contribution, then open the floor for your questions.

Suited to people who know how Go or React, or are interested in other project aspects such as documentation.

Wednesday, March 25 | 16:00 - 16:30 CET • Observability

Generative AI is non-deterministic, and as an industry we are still learning how to use it. This makes observability especially important for AI applications. Beyond typical performance and usage telemetry, AI systems require capturing conversation data to ensure responsible behavior and meaningful results.

Conversation history, however, is verbose and often contains sensitive information, which introduces extra challenges and costs.

In this session, we’ll show you how to instrument your AI applications with OpenTelemetry following the Generative AI Semantic Conventions.

Through a live demo, we’ll demonstrate how to record conversation history alongside performance-related telemetry, and how to separate sensitive data for compliance and cost-saving purposes. We’ll also explore options for running evaluations and recording results based on telemetry data.

Wednesday, March 25 | 17:30 - 18:00 CET • Observability

Modern cloud native applications rely heavily on DNS resolution under the hood—service discovery, external API calls, internal dependencies. Yet, DNS performance issues (latency, timeouts, misconfigurations) often remain invisible in observability stacks, hidden behind “network” or “external call” noise.

This talk proposes integrating DNS observability directly into the OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) agent. We’ll cover the architectural challenges (eBPF context, semantic conventions, scalability), the proposed metrics & tracing model, and the value this adds to operators diagnosing performance or reliability issues. Attendees will walk away with lessons on how to instrument low-level system interactions (like DNS) in a cloud native world, and a blueprint for extending observability in eBPF agents beyond what exists today