Observability Day has become a cornerstone gathering for the cloud native observability community. The event evolved from FluentCon at KubeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia and Open Observability Day at KubeCon North America 2022, bringing together maintainers and practitioners from projects such as Prometheus, Fluentd, Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger.
Observability has come a long way and is now at an inflection point. The ecosystem is converging around shared standards like OpenTelemetry while long-standing projects continue to evolve to meet new scale requirements, cost pressures, and AI-driven workloads.
Who will get the most out of attending this event?
Practitioners running observability in production and platform teams building internal developer platforms will benefit most from Observability Day. The program is heavily oriented toward real-world case studies and production-grade patterns, making it especially valuable for teams operating at scale.
At the same time, the two-track format supports newcomers with introductory sessions alongside advanced deep dives. Maintainers and contributors to CNCF observability projects will also find value in the project updates and in-person collaboration opportunities throughout the day.
What is new and different this year?
This year’s program reflects how observability is expanding beyond traditional monitoring into AI systems, cost efficiency, and large-scale telemetry engineering. Sessions explore AI trace analysis, AI-enabled explainers, profiling innovations, sustainable Kubernetes infrastructure, high-volume logging strategies, column-store storage architectures, and advanced sampling techniques.
There is strong representation across the ecosystem, alongside end-user case studies from organizations operating observability at real production scale. The program highlights both the continued evolution of established projects and the growing intersection between observability and Cloud Native AI.
What will the day look like?
Observability Day is a full-day event featuring two parallel tracks. The day opens with project updates from the co-chairs, followed by a mix of deep-dive talks, end-user case studies, and interactive sessions.
Attendees can expect an interactive panel session, the “Spec-tacular Game Show,” and lightning talks throughout the afternoon. Topics range from foundational concepts to advanced production use cases, giving attendees flexibility to tailor their experience while ensuring broad coverage across the observability landscape.
Should I do any homework first?
A general familiarity with cloud native concepts, especially Kubernetes and distributed systems, is helpful but not required. Attendees who have some exposure to observability fundamentals such as metrics, logs, traces, and telemetry pipelines will get more out of the deeper technical sessions.
That said, the program is intentionally designed with a mix of introductory and advanced talks, so both newcomers and experienced practitioners can find sessions aligned with their interests and experience level.
Find your community!
Observability Day brings together maintainers of CNCF observability projects and the practitioners who rely on them in the same room for a full day. This direct connection between builders and users is rare outside of this event.
It creates space for end users to help shape project roadmaps, for maintainers to better understand real-world challenges, and for cross-project collaboration that is difficult to replicate in online forums. The event also serves as an on-ramp for new contributors looking for a starting point within the CNCF observability ecosystem.Don’t forget to register for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026.