ObservabilityCON is coming. What will you talk about?

We’re looking forward to bringing together observability practitioners for a special series of tech talks and exciting new product announcements during Grafana ObservabilityCON October 26-29. It’s a nontrivial amount of work (and fun!) behind the scenes getting ready for our first-ever event dedicated to all things observability. However, there’s one thing missing from the schedule: you!

That’s right, we have some special speaking opportunities reserved for members of the community to share their observability strategies, projects, and favorite open source tools. Our CFP is open now through September 22, and we’re aiming for a slate of talks that will help attendees regardless of what stage they’re at with their observability journey.

In particular, we’d like to encourage submissions from first-time speakers and speakers from underrepresented groups. We look forward to seeing your proposals!

In addition to Grafana itself, we’re looking to showcase innovative ways of using our community’s favorite open source observability technologies, such as Prometheus, Loki, and Graphite. But of course, we’d also like to leave room for some “non-tech” talks as well that relate to observability.

Need some inspiration? Here are a few ideas for topics we’d love to see our community members talk about:

Adoption

Everyone starts somewhere with their observability journey, and every team has a different approach. Some may have a dedicated squad for observability, while other organizations have the responsibilities fragmented across different teams. In smaller orgs it might be one of the many responsibilities of a full stack engineer. If you recently rolled out a dedicated observability strategy and stack at your company, how did you go about change management? What were some hard decisions you had to make along the way? What strategy did you find work best for you?

Scaling and Architecture

For a lot of cloud-based software companies, COVID-19 lockdowns put a serious strain on their systems. Ensuring that observability stacks could handle the increased activity was mission-critical to their businesses. If your team faced scaling challenges during the pandemic, how did you address them? How have you architected the complex world of observability/tools/metrics/logs/tracing/etc. to support your organization’s business?

Alerting

Often referred to as the “fourth pillar” of observability, alerting is essential for prompt MTTR during incident response. Whether you’re using Grafana Alerts in a clever way or want to share your trials and tribulations while evolving your team’s approach to alerting, we want to hear about it!

Distributed tracing

Ever since our in-house tracing expert Joe Elliot has been churning out amazing tracing blogs and webinars, we’ve had a ton of interest and lots of questions around distributed tracing! But why should Joe have all the glory? If you’ve recently rolled out Zipkin or Jaeger and want to share some things you’ve learned along the way, Grafana ObservabilityCON is an amazing venue for that, especially since Grafana 7+ now ships with built-in support for both tools as data sources.

Migration stories

No one likes hearing about tech debt. Everyone likes hearing about how you got out of it. Have you recently changed up your logging and metrics stack? How can you help others pick the best tool for the job? What’s the business impact involved in evolving your systems?

Loki in production

It’s been almost a year since Loki, our open source log aggregation system, has been GA. We’d love to hear from the community how Loki is being used in production and where it fits into your workflows!

Career paths in observability

An interest in observability can open the door to a world of new career opportunities. What advice would you give someone who wants to get started? What types of skills do you think are important for an observability practitioner to have?

Got an idea for a talk?

Be sure to submit your application here by September 22 at 11:59 PM PT. And if you haven’t already, register now for the conference!

Special thanks to our community member Mikhail Volkov from Redis Labs for inspiring this post!