Opening keynote
Wednesday, May 7
9:00 AM
60 mins
Main Stage
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About this session
Join co-chairs Carl Bergquist, Mihaela Maior, and Richard “RichiH” Hartmann for the official kickoff of our biggest community conference of the year. Grafana Labs CEO/Co-founder Raj Dutt and Grafana creator Torkel Ödegaard will be on hand to celebrate the highlights from the past year. Members of our engineering team will make some exciting announcements around our open source projects and unveil what’s new in Grafana 12.
Speakers
Raj Dutt
CEO, Co-Founder
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Grafana Labs
While in college, Raj founded Voxel, a cloud and hosting company acquired by Internap in 2012. His two great passions are observability and aviation; he got his private pilot’s license almost 20 years ago and has completed his motorglider rating.
Richard "RichiH" Hartmann
Office of the CTO
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Grafana Labs
Richard “RichiH” Hartmann is the Senior Developer Programs Director, a member of the Office of the CTO and a member of the OSPO of Grafana Labs. He is also Prometheus maintainer, OpenMetrics founder, OpenTelemetry member, and more. Among others, he was a CNCF Technical Oversight Committee member, a CNCF Governing Board member, the chair of the CNCF Technical Advisory Group on Observability, and other roles. He’s the only one to receive the CNCF’s “Chop wood, carry water” award for essential background twice. He also leads, organizes, or helps run various conferences from hundreds to 18,000 attendess, including but not limited to KubeCon, PromCon, FOSDEM, DENOG, DebConf, and Chaos Communication Congress. In the past, he made mainframe databases work, ISP backbones run, kept the largest IRC network on Earth running, and designed and built a datacenter from scratch. Go through his talks, podcasts, interviews, and articles at https://github.com/RichiH/talks or follow him on Mastodon at https://chaos.social/@RichiH for musings on the intersection of technology and society.
David Kaltschmidt
Senior Director, Engineering
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Grafana Labs
David works at Grafana Labs as a Senior Director of Engineering. Previously he worked on Prometheus and Cortex and at companies such as Weaveworks, Oracle, and Acme Packet. David has been building UIs for the networking industry for over a decade.
Mihaela Maior
Director of Engineering
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Grafana Labs
Mihaela is a senior leader with a keen interest in open leadership, agile mindset, and value creation. Since joining Grafana Labs, she has been leading a growing engineering team focused on visualizing, sharing, and correlating data using Grafana. In her free time, which is shared with her family and dogs, Mihaela enjoys hiking, camping, and spending time outdoors.
Ryan McKinley
Distinguished Engineer
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Grafana Labs
Ryan is a Distinguished Engineer at Grafana Labs. Before joining the company, he was the leading community contributor to the open source Grafana project. Ryan has worked as a software engineer at Makani and Natel Energy, where he implemented Grafana to help run next-generation hydropower plants. He received a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Visual Arts from UC San Diego and a Master of Science from the Media Lab at MIT.
Torkel Ödegaard
CGO, Co-Founder
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Grafana Labs
Torkel is the creator of Grafana, the open source metrics dashboard that Grafana Labs is built around. He enjoys seeing people use metrics more through beautiful and easy to use software. Torkel is infatuated with the theory of evolution.
Andrew Stucky
Senior Engineering Manager
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Grafana Labs
Andrew is a Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs with over a decade of hands-on experience in software engineering. Passionate about building high-quality digital products, Andrew specializes in crafting intuitive, opinionated, and easy-to-use user experiences that drive meaningful interactions. Beyond frontend and UX, Andrew has spent a significant portion of their career architecting and scaling complex distributed backend systems. Their expertise extends to the instrumentation and observability of distributed systems, ensuring that high-performance applications remain reliable and maintainable at scale. With a strong belief in pragmatic engineering and developer experience, Andrew enjoys bridging the gap between frontend and backend, making systems not only functional but also a pleasure to work with. They are an advocate for clear abstractions, efficient tooling, and thoughtful design that enables developers and users alike. While not managing teams at Grafana, Andrew contributes to open-source projects, shares knowledge through talks and writing, and continuously explores ways to improve the craft of software engineering.
Cyril Tovena
Principal Software Engineer
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Grafana Labs
At Grafana Labs, Cyril mainly focuses on Loki, an open source logs aggregation system inspired by Prometheus. He previously worked at Ubisoft, scaling dedicated game servers in the cloud using Kubernetes. Cyril also contributed to Agones creation, an open source project to scale dedicated servers on Kubernetes.
Ted Young
Developer Programs Director
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Grafana Labs
Ted Young is a co-founder of the OpenTelemetry project. Prior to that, he worked on Diego, the container scheduling system for Cloud Foundry. For work, his main area of interest is in correctness and reliability for large scale distributed software systems. For fun, he likes to makes movies, and tries to get as far away from the computers as humanly possible.
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