KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2023 preview: Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, load testing, and more!

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU 2023, the preeminent gathering for the cloud native community, is happening this week, and Grafanistas will be on hand to share their knowledge and answer your questions.

This year Grafana Labs is a proud sponsor of KubeCon EU, as well as Observability Day 2023, a vendor-neutral gathering for the community to discuss and share best practices in observability. The events will be held in Amsterdam, with three days of activities kicking off on Tuesday, April 18. Drop by Booth S36 at KubeCon’s sponsor solutions showcase any time to meet the team and grab some Grafana swag, or contact us to set up a meeting. We hope to see you there!

Also be sure to check out the following talks led by the Grafana Labs team. Virtual passes are still available! 

Prometheus native histograms in production 

Tuesday, April 18 | 9:50 CET

Grafana Labs Principal Software Engineer Björn “Beorn” Rabenstein is no stranger to histograms. As a Prometheus maintainer, he has spoken and written about histograms often, and this time he is bringing his experience with the new native histograms feature into the spotlight. Though the feature is still experimental, Beorn will showcase how the histograms work “in the wild” while also sharing performance results when you turn up the resolution or partition a histogram into multiple dimensions.  

Using OpenTelemetry’s exponential histograms in Prometheus 

Tuesday, April 18 | 10:50 CET

Join Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineers Ruslan Kovalov, who is also an OpenTelemetry maintainer, and Ganesh Vernekar, who is also a Prometheus maintainer, as they tag-team to showcase the capabilities and design of the new high-resolution histograms in OpenTelemetry and Prometheus. 

You’ll learn how to use OpenTelemetry’s high-resolution histograms in Prometheus with its native support for translation and how they bring a whole new set of capabilities over the conventional histogram present in Prometheus, including but not limited to, better storage efficiency, higher accuracy of quantile estimations, flexible histogram buckets, and simple configuration.

Panel discussion: The present and future of open source observability 

Tuesday, April 18 | 13:35 CET

Grafana Labs Software Engineer Juraci Paixão Kröhling, who is a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project and a member of the project’s governing board, will join representatives from AWS, Apple, Lightstep, and more to discuss the state of observability today and the exciting developments to look forward to in the future. 

Prometheus updates and deep dive 

Wednesday, April 19 | 11:55 CET

Two Prometheus maintainers walk into a KubeCon talk … Grafana Labs Software Engineer Josue Abreu and Polar Signals Software Engineer Kemal Akkoyun will share all their tips and tricks around using Prometheus and the latest features that have been introduced. You’ll also get an inside look at what’s coming down the pipeline and how you can help contribute to the popular open source project. 

Emergent load testing: Rules for organized chaos 

Wednesday, April 19 | 14:30 CET

Emergence is a phenomenon where parts of a whole independently develop properties not originally present. Grafana Labs Senior Developer Advocate Nicole van der Hoeven will address the growing field of emergent software and the key ingredients that are needed to create successful emergent load testing scripts: a large population size, opportunities to interact, feedback, and an element of control. You’ll learn how to bring these elements together in Grafana k6 with a load testing script that can independently decide what requests to make next, modify Kubernetes app pods, and disrupt services based on a continual feed of results during runtime — all without manual intervention. 

Cilium updates, news, roadmap, and in the wild 

Wednesday, April 19 | 17:25 CET

Last fall, Grafana Labs announced a strategic partnership with Isovalent, the creators of Cilium, to make it easy for platform and application teams to gain deep insights into the connectivity, security, and performance of the applications running on Kubernetes by leveraging the open source Grafana LGTM Stack (Loki for logs, Grafana for visualization, Tempo for traces, Mimir for metrics). In this session, you’ll get an update from Isovalent Chief Open Source Officer Liz Rice on how Cilium has been evolving as a project and learn more about the latest developments and future roadmap. You’ll also hear from Grafana Labs Director of Community Richard “RichiH” Hartmann about how Grafana Labs leverages and contributes to the project. 

Looking for more ways to connect with Grafana Labs? Check out our events page to see upcoming in-person and virtual opportunities.