Observability Summit North America 2026

This talk presents a practical methodology for migrating a large proprietary observability platform to an OpenTelemetry-native architecture, using a GenAI-assisted workflow paired with a robust spec-driven strategy. Faced with hundreds of custom Java-based sensors, the engineering team designed a spec-driven conversion process that leverages GenAI to extract specifications, generate unit tests, and assist in implementing Go-based OpenTelemetry receivers. Each stage incorporates human review and test feedback loops to address the reliability limitations of GenAI and ensure functional correctness.

Additionally, a data-driven feasibility evaluation was conducted prior to large-scale conversion, where defined task types were benchmarked with and without GenAI to quantify effort savings and highlight where GenAI provides the greatest value.

Attendees will learn a reproducible workflow for large-scale migrations from proprietary to OpenTelemetry, how to pair GenAI with automated testing to manage risk, and insights on where GenAI accelerates real-world engineering tasks without compromising quality.

This session presents an AI-powered SRE Agent designed to autonomously orchestrates complex, multi-source investigations by querying internal observability providers and knowledge bases.
A primary focus is the "Data Volume Problem." Modern observability systems generate terabytes of metrics and logs daily; at Nubank’s scale, the Prometheus MCP alone has more than 23,000 metrics available, while log queries can span billions of rows. The team overcame LLM context limits through on-premises data filtering, intelligent summarization, and selective context assembly. This architecture utilizes "Expert Guides" to reduce 23,000 raw metrics to approximately 14 relevant data points before LLM processing.
The talk covers multi-source orchestration using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) for pluggable tool discovery, allowing the AI to progressively load and correlate only the observability sources.
The platform enables the delivery of expert instructions for any specific scenario through targeted, versioned prompts. This transformation allows the platform to scale across the enterprise, performing virtually any investigative task beyond its original root cause analysis mission.

Enterprises often struggle with the "black box" nature of proprietary APM tools and the high cost of distributed tracing at scale. In this session, we will demonstrate how Comcast tackled this challenge by migrating 350 critical applications from AppDynamics to a cloud-native OpenTelemetry (OTel) stack, achieving a truly unified end-to-end observability experience.

We will pull back the curtain on the architecture that powers this migration. Specifically, we will show how we leveraged the OpenTelemetry Collector to generate Request, Error, and Duration (R.E.D.) metrics from trace data using the SpanMetrics connector. A key highlight will be our unique deployment of Conduit, which serves as a resilient transport layer to ensure data integrity and effective load balancing in a high-volume environment.

Attendees will leave with a blueprint for breaking free from APM vendor lock-in. To help the community fast-track this transition, we will also be sharing and walking through our reusable, battle-tested Grafana dashboards that can be leveraged by any enterprise.