Grafana Labs at KubeCon North America 2026

Kepler is a CNCF Sandbox project that monitors power usage and attributes it to Pods and other resources in Kubernetes clusters. Adoption is growing: it is used by leading Linux Foundation Project Sylva's telco carriers to optimize CNFs on bare metal, and by CERN to optimize the environmental impact of their MLOps against their sustainability KPIs. Yet while Kepler took a step forward in accuracy during the rewrite, we had to take a big step backward for the virtual machine use case, since we lost the trained model server (hint: we're solving this). What challenges and opportunities lie ahead for the project?

OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation made broad observability effortless: one command, zero code changes, every service covered. But breadth isn't always the whole story. OpenTelemetry SDK instrumentations operate at the language level, surfacing transaction details that can be lifesavers in debugging scenarios and provide invaluable insights to developers. The catch: rolling out SDK instrumentation across a diverse, multi-technology/multi-team ecosystem can be slow and expensive. This talk introduces a practical approach that eliminates the tradeoff: by combining eBPF instrumentation with SDK auto-injection, teams get broad coverage immediately and deep, language-level insights where needed, with a single deployment mechanism and dynamic cost controls. We’ll do a live demo of this combined instrumentation approach and show how with a single command we can instrument everything in our system, upgrade to new OpenTelemetry SDK versions and control the cost of our instrumentation.

Join us for the Women’s Community Gathering, a welcoming space for women, non-binary and allies across the cloud native community to connect, share experiences, and learn from one another. While we may share some experiences, our journeys through technology and open source are shaped by many different identities, backgrounds, cultures, career stages, and circumstances. Through facilitated activities and conversation, we’ll explore these different perspectives, reflect on where we each hold privilege, and practice listening to experiences different from our own. Together, we’ll turn those reflections into practical conversations about allyship: how we can use our own position and influence to support others and help build a cloud native community where more people can participate, contribute, and thrive.

OTTL is already everywhere in advanced OpenTelemetry Collector pipelines. It is the tool teams use to filter noisy data, transform telemetry in flight, route signals, enforce conventions, and shape pipelines without writing custom code. But using OTTL effectively requires a practical understanding of how to apply it to real pipeline problems. This hands-on tutorial is framed around exactly those problems. Through live Collector configs, running examples, and tools like ottl.run, attendees will learn how to write maintainable statements, debug unexpected behavior, and solve common pipeline challenges. The session also covers advanced patterns, practical OTTL tips and hacks, extending OTTL in a custom Collector distribution, and newer capabilities to watch. Led by OpenTelemetry and OTTL maintainers, this tutorial gives beginners, intermediate users, and advanced practitioners practical techniques they can apply immediately as well as insight into the design decisions shaping OTTL.

Kubernetes gave the industry a powerful model for infrastructure: versioned APIs, declarative resources, and clear compatibility rules. We turned to those same ideas after hitting the limits of bespoke APIs and service-specific backend logic in Grafana. This talk shares what changed when we applied those ideas to Grafana by modeling functionality using standard Kubernetes-style extension mechanisms, and, in doing so, evolved a system used by 25M+ people where existing workflows are heavily relied on. We'll show how we used custom resources and controller-based workflows where a resource model fit naturally, and custom routes or aggregated API servers where it did not. Using our 3-year journey to a stable dashboards v1 API as a case study, attendees will leave with a rubric for when these patterns are worth the investment, how to handle the parts of an application that do not fit neatly, and what this model unlocked for infrastructure-as-code workflows and new product capabilities.