Grafana Labs at PromCon: Prometheus 3.0, OpenTelemetry, native histograms, and more!
PromCon is right around the corner and we’re looking forward to seeing you there! We’re gearing up for the biggest release of Prometheus in the last five years, Prometheus 3.0, and we can’t wait to share all the new features we, and the community, have been working on.
PromCon EU 2024 will take place Wednesday, Sept. 11 and Thursday, Sept. 12, in Berlin. This will be the ninth edition of the maintainer-led conference, which brings together Prometheus users and developers from around the world.
Grafana Labs has supported the Prometheus project in myriad ways over the years, consistently employing the most Prometheus maintainers and sponsoring the most feature work, like driving OpenTelemetry compatibility, native histograms, remote write 2.0, and other major 3.0 features. We’re also a diamond sponsor for this year’s PromCon.
Prometheus also remains a critical topic in our community. According to our most recent Observability Survey, 89% of respondents are investing in Prometheus and 57% have seen their usage increased year over year.
Grafana Labs will have a sizable presence at PromCon this year, with Grafanistas participating in eight sessions (see below for more details). We’ll also have a booth in the expo hall where you can speak with our experts to answer any of your questions about Prometheus or Grafana, so stop by any time during the two-day event. We’ll also have a 3D printer, monitored by Prometheus, Grafana Loki, and Grafana, printing all kinds of trinkets (fidget coins, keyrings, shopping cart tokens, and earrings) for you to take home!
Sessions to attend
The following is a list of PromCon sessions led by Grafanistas.
Practical OpenTelemetry with Prometheus 3.0
Wednesday, 9:45 (all times local)
Arve Knudsen and Jesús Vázquez, both Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineers and Prometheus maintainers, lead this session that will cover the work that has gone into making Prometheus 3.0 a great OpenTelemetry (OTel) metrics store. They’ll talk about new features and requirements for getting started.
Unlocking cost savings & new possibilities: Your guide to Prometheus remote write 2.0
Wednesday, 10:15
Get to know the next iteration Prometheus remote write, the popular protocol used to send Prometheus metrics from Prometheus or any other metric source to compatible remote storage endpoints. RW 2.0 co-authors Alex Greenbank, Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs, Bartek Płotka, Senior Software Engineer at Google,will talk about how this release adds more functionality, cuts your egress costs up to 60%, and maintains the easy-to-implement stateless design.
Why not just dots? UTF-8 support in Prometheus 3.0
Wednesday, 11:15
In this session, Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineer Owen Williams provides an overview of the design and implementation of UTF-8 support for metric and label names in Prometheus. He’ll discuss the approach behind the design and show how Prometheus maintains compatibility with older systems and will support metric name migrations.
Inside a PromQL query: understanding the mechanics
Thursday, 9:15
Join Grafana Labs Distinguished Engineer Bryan Boreham for a deep dive into the internals of Prometheus. Trace the data flow from its origin to its final destination at the API so you have a better understanding of query efficiency. Bryan will also address recent optimizations that have significantly improved query performance in Prometheus.
The future of metadata in Prometheus: enhancing storage and usability
Thursday, 11:15
Arve is back for a second PromCon session, but this time he’s joined by Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineer Ganesh Vernekar. The pair will address the evolving landscape of metadata in Prometheus, and the use cases that call for more robust management systems. They’ll discuss their initial design considerations for a persistent metadata store that can handle these requirements. They’ll also cover the anticipated benefits and invite the community to contribute to shaping the future of metadata in Prometheus.
Practical anomaly detection at scale with PromQL
Thursday, 13:15
We’ve built a scalable anomaly detection system to aid in debugging at Grafana Labs that helps us avoid noisy alerts during regular daily or weekly spikes. In this talk, Grafana Labs Principal Engineer Jorge Creixell and Manoj Acharya, Grafana Labs VP, Engineering, Observability and founder of Asserts, will discuss why we chose to adopt this system and we’ll open source the framework to detect anomalies using only PromQL.
Implementing out-of-order native histograms in Prometheus
Thursday, 14:15
Join Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineers Carrie Edwards and Fiona Liao as they discuss their first substantial contribution to Prometheus — support for out-of-order ingestion in native histograms. They’ll talk about the challenges and changes in the TSDB that were required to make this happen. They’ll also share how they familiarized themselves with the TSDB and look to encourage others to contribute to Prometheus.
The weirdest PromQL you’ll ever see: PromQL for reporting, analytics, and business intelligence
Thursday, 15:45
Go on a journey with Grafana Labs Senior Software Engineer Sam Jewell as he discusses all the ways the time dimension can be controlled when querying PromQL. You’ll learn how to query for daily, weekly, or monthly data directly from Prometheus so you can spot longer-term trends or growth rates and compare it with data from your other sources, for correlation or auditing purposes.
See you at PromCon!
We can’t wait to see everyone at this year’s conference. Again, if you can’t make it to the sessions, feel free to stop by our booth. And if you haven’t signed up yet, now’s the perfect time, because conference organizers have shared a 5% discount with us: Register as an attendee using the code PROMCON24BMU.
And if you can’t be there in person, you can also watch the live streams of the first and second days of the conference.
Looking for more ways to connect with Grafana Labs? Check out our events page to see upcoming in-person and virtual opportunities.
