Observability Summit North America 2026: Full Schedule

May 21-22, 2026
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The schedule is subject to change.

9:35am CDT

Keynote: 10 Million Spans Per Second: Lessons From Scaling OpenTelemetry at Reddit - Trevor Riles, Reddit

Thursday May 21, 2026 9:35am - 10:00am CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Reddit processes over 25 billion tracing events per hour across thousands of services. In this talk, we share how we scaled our OpenTelemetry-based distributed tracing platform by 67% in one year—and what broke along the way.

We'll cover our architecture: OpenTelemetry instrumentation across Python, Go, and JavaScript baseplate libraries feeding into Kafka pipelines and ClickHouse storage. You'll learn how we handled an incident that spiked ingestion to well over 10 million spans per second, the sampling strategies we developed to balance cost with debuggability, and why instrumenting three language runtimes simultaneously is harder than it sounds.

Key takeaways:
- Practical patterns for multi-language OTel instrumentation at scale
- Remote sampling strategies that adapt to traffic patterns
- ClickHouse schema design for sub-second trace queries
- Building adoption through cross-functional partnerships, not mandates

Whether you're starting your tracing journey or scaling an existing platform, this talk provides battle-tested lessons from running distributed tracing infrastructure serving one of the world's largest online communities.

Speakers

Trevor Riles

Senior Software Engineer, Reddit

Trevor Riles is a Senior Software Engineer on Reddit's Observability team, where he owns the distributed tracing platform. He previously co-presented at KubeCon on Reddit's Thanos metrics infrastructure and has been building observability systems at Reddit since 2021.

Thursday May 21, 2026 9:35am - 10:00am CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Keynote Sessions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

10:50am CDT

OpenTelemetry GenAI in Practice: What the Spec Says Vs. What You Actually See - Zach Groves, Datadog

Thursday May 21, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

OpenTelemetry’s GenAI semantic conventions are evolving quickly. Version 1.37 marked a major shift in how LLM behavior is expressed using standard spans and attributes. While later releases refined and clarified the spec, real-world adoption remains uneven, and “GenAI-compatible” can mean very different things across the ecosystem.

In this talk, I’ll share hands-on lessons from implementing and validating GenAI support in real emitters, including close collaboration with Strands. Implementing the 1.37 spec on both sides surfaced semantic ambiguities that only became clear in practice and ultimately led to stronger implementations.

I’ll also outline the current GenAI instrumentation landscape: Strands emitting 1.37+ compliant spans; OpenLLMetry, which mixes newer conventions with legacy and custom attributes; and OpenInference, which claims OpenTelemetry compatibility but does not emit GenAI semantic convention attributes.

Finally, I’ll show how these gaps surface in practice—teams believing they emit 1.37-compliant telemetry but sending pre-1.37 or non-spec data—and briefly touch on transition guidance like OTEL_SEMCONV_STABILITY_OPT_IN.

Speakers

Zach Groves

Software Engineer II, Datadog

Zach learned to code at Barnes & Noble during rest days between climbing while living in a van. He spent 3 years on the support team before moving over to engineering team at Datadog (3 years on APM and 1 on LLM Obs). He currently works on LLM Obs Otel compatibility. He likes scuba... Read More →

North America Observability otel genai presentation.pptx pdf

Thursday May 21, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

10:50am CDT

Taming Observability at Scale in a Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Platform at Bloomberg - Joe Nathan Abellard, Bloomberg

Thursday May 21, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Bloomberg runs a managed, multi-cluster Kubernetes platform built atop Karmada to support AI and streaming analytics workloads. This comes with challenges around observability at scale. To meet disaster recovery requirements, we use a multi-region architecture where each Karmada control plane is hosted on management clusters spanning multiple regions. This helps ensure high availability, but also adds complexity related to observability. For example, how do we aggregate and visualize metrics across multiple Prometheus servers when each management cluster has a dedicated Prometheus setup?

This talk covers our multi-region architecture to meet DR requirements and our Prometheus stack with Thanos for global metrics aggregation. We’ll explore how we choose the right signals and define meaningful alerts in a complex multi-cluster environment to curb alert fatigue, while ensuring timely issue detection. We’ll also discuss the challenges of defining SLIs and SLOs in a multi-tenant platform.

Speakers

Joe Nathan Abellard

Senior Software Engineer, Bloomberg

Joe Nathan Abellard is a Senior Software Engineer on the Cloud Native Compute Services (CNCS) Platform Engineering team at Bloomberg. He's the lead engineer and product owner for Bloomberg's large-scale, managed multi-cluster Kubernetes platform, built on the CNCF Karmada project... Read More →

Thursday May 21, 2026 10:50am - 11:15am CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

11:20am CDT

Quantiles at Scale: Choosing the Right Estimation Algorithms for Observability - Mike Shi, ClickHouse

Thursday May 21, 2026 11:20am - 11:45am CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Quantiles like p90 and p99 sit at the heart of observability. They define dashboards, drive SLOs, and shape how teams reason about system performance. They are also some of the most expensive metrics to compute, and the cost grows fast as data volumes increase.
To keep up, observability systems rely heavily on approximate quantile algorithms such as sketches and probabilistic data structures, including t-digest. These approaches work well at small and medium scale, but at tens or hundreds of petabytes, things start to creak and limitations become apparent.
We share hard won lessons from operating ClickHouse at extreme scale, where quantile estimation must remain accurate and affordable over hundreds of petabytes of data. We break down the most common quantile algorithms used in observability today, explain their real trade offs, and show when each approach makes sense. We also explore a critical design decision: when quantiles should be computed on the fly at query time versus pre aggregated during ingestion.
The goal is to give you a practical framework for choosing quantile algorithms that scale, rather than blindly relying on defaults that stop working as your data grows.

Speakers

Mike Shi

Head of Product, Observability, ClickHouse

Mike leads observability at ClickHouse, where he works on building a developer-friendly observability platform. He joined ClickHouse through the acquisition of HyperDX, a company he co-founded, after spending the last five years building observability platforms for engineers—accidentally... Read More →

Quantiles At Scale pdf

Thursday May 21, 2026 11:20am - 11:45am CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

11:50am CDT

⚡ Lightning Talk: Summarizing the Noise: LLM Observability With Open Data Hub, VLLM, KServe and Prometheus - Twinkll Sisodia, Red Hat

Thursday May 21, 2026 11:50am - 12:00pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

As large language models (LLMs) move into production, raw metrics alone aren’t enough. This talk presents an open-source AI observability solution built on Open Data Hub (ODH) that deploys LLMs using vLLM and KServe, scrapes inference metrics using Prometheus, and feeds them into a summarization model to generate actionable insights. We’ll demonstrate a working UI that translates low-level metrics like latency, GPU usage, and token throughput into human-readable summaries—giving platform teams an intelligent way to monitor LLMs at scale. No dashboards to interpret—just straight answers from your models about your models.

Speakers

Twinkll Sisodia

Senior Software Engineer, OpenShift AI (Red Hat), Red Hat

Twinkll Sisodia is a Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat, building scalable, production-ready GenAI solutions. She works with partners to integrate their technology into OpenShift AI and contributes to open source in AI observability, platform optimization, and sustainability. Her... Read More →

Thursday May 21, 2026 11:50am - 12:00pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

1:15pm CDT

Panel: Telemetry That Matters - Diana Todea, VictoriaMetrics; Antonio Jimenez Martinez, Cisco ThousandEyes; Laura Luttmer, Dynatrace

Thursday May 21, 2026 1:15pm - 1:50pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Instrumentation has never been easier, but are we truly gaining clarity? As data volumes rise, dashboards multiply, and observability costs increase, developers may feel less insight and more friction. Are we collecting telemetry with purpose or just because we can? What problem is this data meant to solve?
This panel brings together practitioners across open standards, developer experience and real-world reliability engineering. The discussion will examine how zero code instrumentation affects workflows and system understanding, how meaningful telemetry improves day to day engineering work and why unfiltered or unstructured data often has the opposite effect. The conversation will cover practical lessons for filtering, dropping, reducing and shaping telemetry so teams maintain visibility without unnecessary volume or cost. Finally, we explore scaling observability across fleets of collectors with an OpAMP server, ensuring consistent signal delivery and manageability as telemetry grows.
At the center is a guiding question: What is the purpose of the telemetry we collect and how do we ensure it remains aligned with developer needs, operational requirements, and system reliability?

Speakers

Antonio Jimenez Martinez

Tech Lead Software Engineer, Cisco ThousandEyes

I am a Tech Lead Software Engineer at Cisco ThousandEyes, specializing in observability to ensure our customers can effectively monitor their products. My recent work involves using OpenTelemetry to stream telemetry data, enhancing network visibility and performance for our clients... Read More →

Diana Todea

Developer Experience Engineer, VictoriaMetrics

Diana is a Developer Experience Engineer at VictoriaMetrics. She has worked as a Senior Site Reliability Engineer focused on Observability. She is an active member of the OpenTelemetry CNCF open source project, co-organizer of Cloud Native Days Romania, co-lead of neurodiversity working... Read More →

Laura Luttmer

Sr. Product Manager, Bindplane (Dynatrace)

I am a Product Manager at Bindplane based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. With over 10 years of product experience spanning SaaS, legal, and data platforms, I focus on OpenTelemetry-native pipeline solutions, AI-powered telemetry intelligence, and helping customers get more out of their... Read More →

Thursday May 21, 2026 1:15pm - 1:50pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices

Content Experience Level Intermediate

1:55pm CDT

Policy as Code Meets OpenTelemetry: The Next Frontier of Observability - Christopher Voisey, EnforceAuth

Thursday May 21, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

Modern observability stacks excel at capturing signals about infrastructure health, application performance, and request flows. Yet one critical class of decisions remains largely invisible: authorization.
In distributed systems, authorization decisions increasingly determine not only whether an action succeeds, but if data is accessed, tools are invoked, or automated agents are allowed to act. These decisions are often evaluated outside application code using Policy as Code frameworks, yet their outcomes are rarely observable in a structured, privacy preserving way.
In this session, we explore how Policy as Code, Open Policy Agent, and the OpenTelemetry project can be combined to treat authorization decisions as observable events. We examine what it means to observe a decision without logging sensitive inputs, how decision structure differs from traditional metrics and traces, and why decision level observability is becoming essential in cloud native and AI driven systems.
Attendees will leave with a conceptual framework for thinking about authorization as telemetry, and a clearer understanding of where observability is heading as systems become more autonomous and policy driven.

Speakers

Christopher Voisey

Field CTO, EnforceAuth

Chris is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience designing and delivering secure, cloud-native systems. He has led engineering and solutions teams across startups and enterprises, helping organizations adopt policy-as-code, zero-trust architectures, and modern observability... Read More →

Thursday May 21, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

CNCF Observability Projects

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:25pm CDT

Whats the Best Way To Reduce Storage Requirements Without Losing Insights? Push AI To the Edge! - Alex Degitz, ElastiFlow Inc

Thursday May 21, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

During this session we’ll discuss ElastiFlow’s Edge Observability strategy, which includes an OTel native edge processing node with local DuckDB storage for all OTel signals and an agentic AI system that is model agnostic (we often run it with OpenAI’s gpt-oss-20b), exposing its tools through an MCP server.

Instead of just forwarding OTel signals from various Edge collectors, the signals are analyzed and routing decisions are made. Alerts are sent to the Observability Platform right away, while logs are stored locally and analyzed for patterns. Instead of forwarding all logs, we might only care about a few conditions of interest, often correlated with other signals, and send these to the Observability Platform, while less interesting logs can be aggressively aggregated.

With this approach, we were able to reduce the storage and ingest cost of Observability Platforms by half while actually decreasing the mean time to insight.

Speakers

Alex Degitz

VP of Product, ElastiFlow Inc

Alex has been building Automation and Observability products for 10+ years and has been advocating to break down silos between operations teams ever since.

Thursday May 21, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:55pm CDT

One Pane to Rule Them All: Uniting the Prometheus Community with OpenSearch Dashboards, Logs, and Trace - Anirudha Jadhav and Kevin Fallis, AWS

Thursday May 21, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

As infrastructure scales across regions and clusters, Prometheus deployments fragment into isolated islands of metrics—disconnected from logs, traces, and the dashboards operators actually live in.

This talk is for the Prometheus community. If you've wrestled with federation sprawl, alert duplication, or the gap between your metrics and the rest of your observability story, this session is for you.

We'll demonstrate how OpenSearch's distributed data source support lets multiple Prometheus clusters coexist natively alongside logs and traces in a single unified interface, no data migration, no parallel stacks.

You'll learn:

Unified querying across Prometheus clusters
SLO tracking wired directly into dashboards
Application management that finally connects the signals your teams have been operating in isolation

This is about completing the observability loop the Prometheus community has always needed, open, composable, and community-driven.

Speakers

Kevin Fallis

Principal Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

Kevin Fallis is seasoned leader, architect, and developer with experience across many industry verticals and disciplines such as agriculture, ad tech, financial services, networking, security, telecommunications and of course search technologies. His passion helps others leverage... Read More →

Anirudha Jadhav

Sr. Engineering Leader, Amazon Web Services

Anirudha is a Senior Manager, Software Development at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leading development of insight engines and visualization platforms for the OpenSearch Project. He specializes in distributed systems, data analytics, and search technologies, including architecting one... Read More →

Thursday May 21, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

3:40pm CDT

The Full Picture: Visualizing Service "Fullness" To Rethink Saturation Prevention - Tal Nordan, Independent

Thursday May 21, 2026 3:40pm - 4:05pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Saturation has long been the stepchild of "the Four Golden Signals of SRE". While latency, traffic, and errors are directly measurable through metrics like P99, RPS, and 5xx rates, monitoring just how "full" a service is relies on indirect symptoms such as CPU usage or queue depth. Yet, saturation should ideally rather be the first signal to alert, as once it's reached, other signals - latency and errors - spike fast.

The inability to directly observe and mitigate saturation drives excessive safety margins, chronically low CPU utilization and massive compute waste in latency-sensitive and customer-facing systems. This session introduces an open-source approach extending Envoy proxy and its seamless integration through eBPF and Cilium, to provide direct observability into service saturation, by comparing each instance's live number of concurrent requests to its true concurrency limit. We then explore how such direct visualization of saturation can help reduce MTTR and minimize waste.

Speakers

Tal Nordan

Software Engineer, Independent

An early contributor to the Envoy proxy project, now working on developing tools to detect and mitigate inefficiencies in the way services interact with each other. Over the years Tal has been a founding engineer and a contractor working on a wide variety of cloud-native data-plane... Read More →

Thursday May 21, 2026 3:40pm - 4:05pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

4:10pm CDT

Why Are Your AI’s Decisions Hard To Explain: Trace Every Decision With Agentic AI Observability - Dhiraj Kumar Jain & Vikash Agrawal, Amazon Web Services

Thursday May 21, 2026 4:10pm - 4:35pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

Agentic AI systems represent a fundamental shift in software architecture: autonomous agents reason, plan, invoke tools, and orchestrate complex workflows without deterministic control flow. This breaks many assumptions behind traditional observability.

When agents independently make decisions, failures no longer follow a single request path. How do you debug emergent behavior across multiple agent steps? How do you analyze and control token-driven costs? How do you ensure reliability when outputs are non-deterministic?

This session explores why observability is a first-class requirement in the agentic AI era and how OpenSearch can act as the analytical backbone for understanding autonomous AI systems in production. We will cover practical techniques for instrumenting agent workflows with OpenTelemetry and indexing traces, logs, metrics, and AI decision artifacts into OpenSearch for deep correlation and analysis.

Attendees will learn battle-tested patterns for tracing agent reasoning and tool usage, investigating failures and hallucinations, monitoring latency and cost signals, and building dashboards that make agentic AI systems transparent, debuggable, and production-ready.

Speakers

Dhiraj Kumar Jain

Sr. Software Engineer, AWS

Dhiraj is a software engineer at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he’s working on building a next-gen log analytics platform with CloudWatch Logs, helping scale it to handle vast amounts of data. Before this, worked in Amazon AuroraDB.

A distributed systems enthusiast, Dhiraj loves diving into complex, large-scale problems and building software for the next billion users. When he’s not scaling systems, you’ll find him at tech meetups and hackathons... Read More →

Vikash Agrawal

Vikash Agarwal, Amazon Web Services

Vikash Agrawal is a Software Development Manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), leading initiatives in the AWS CloudWatch team. Previously, he played a key role in developing Amazon Q Developer, a Generative AI-powered assistant for developers. With over a decade of experience in software... Read More →

Observability for Agentic AI pdf

Thursday May 21, 2026 4:10pm - 4:35pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

4:10pm CDT

Secure by Design: Rethinking Test Credentials for Synthetic Monitoring - Katie Kodes, Katie Kodes

Thursday May 21, 2026 4:10pm - 4:35pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Synthetic monitoring and end-to-end testing often require dangerous levels of access to production systems. Last summer, I nearly emailed my bank details to a team I was training on new testing tools. If I hadn't caught that mistake, I probably would have dumped them into an OTel collector too.

This session explores the security implications of common testing practices, and presents practical alternatives that maintain observability without compromising security.

Attendees will learn authentication and authorization patterns to improve test security across the software development lifecycle.

Implementing mitigations like health check endpoints, synthetic data, and privilege separation spans the full stack of infrastructure, development, monitoring, and governance. Attendees will leave with a shared vocabulary they can use to align business, development, security, and observability teams on safer test traffic in production.

Speakers

Katie Kodes

DevOps Architect

Katie is a DevOps architect who brings clarity to complex technical challenges across the entire stack. With experience ranging from infrastructure to front-end development, she helps teams build reliable, observable systems that deliver real business value. A passionate educator... Read More →

Katie Kodes Observability Summit 2026 Slide Deck pdf

Thursday May 21, 2026 4:10pm - 4:35pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

9:20am CDT

Keynote: Tracing the Agent's Mind: Extending OpenTelemetry for Deep MCP Inspection - Mustafa Dayıoğlu, TUBITAK & Zeyno Dodd, Conjectura R&D

Friday May 22, 2026 9:20am - 9:45am CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Production AI agents make thousands of tool-calling decisions daily, yet observability stops at the model boundary. OpenTelemetry's GenAI semantic conventions capture token counts and latencies—what the LLM processed—but not why an agent selected a specific tool. Research (McKenzie et al., 2023) demonstrates inverse scaling: more capable models exhibit unpredictable tool selection patterns. This gap leaves engineers guessing during critical production failures.

We present gen-ai-otel, an open-source OpenTelemetry extension introducing decision-level telemetry for MCP agents. A new attribute namespace (gen_ai.agent.*) captures tool selection confidence, session context, permission scope validation, and baseline deviations. The zero-sidecar architecture routes telemetry through standard Collector pipelines to existing backends—Jaeger, Prometheus, or graph databases—with low overhead and cardinality-aware attributes.

A live demo reconstructs an agent's decision chain, revealing anomalies invisible to token metrics—reducing decision-debugging time. Attendees leave with: 1) Collector configs, 2) Grafana dashboards for confidence tracking, 3) demo code and repo—all Apache 2.0 licensed.

Speakers

mustafa dayıoğlu

Senior Chief Researcher, TUBITAK (THE SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL RESEARCH COUNCIL OF TÜRKİYE)

Mustafa Dayıoğlu (PhD, ITU) is a security architect with 25 years of experience in cybersecurity at TÜBİTAK, designing large-scale security systems serving 80 million citizens for regulated environments. Specializes in threat modeling and protocol development for AI agent systems... Read More →

Zeyno Dodd

R&D Solution Architect, Conjectura R&D

R&D Architect with 25+ years building distributed systems and leading open research collaborations. Principal collaborator on SFAMDF and GraphSentinel—open initiatives exploring proactive, federated security patterns for MCP‑based agentic AI systems. Research interests include... Read More →

Tracing the Agent s Mind intro 53s mp4

cfp keynote v3.1 pdf

Friday May 22, 2026 9:20am - 9:45am CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Keynote Sessions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

10:20am CDT

Observing the Observers: Bringing OpenTelemetry to Autonomous AI Agents - Abdel Fane, OpenA2A

Friday May 22, 2026 10:20am - 10:45am CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

Traditional observability assumes humans operate systems. AI agents break that model—they make autonomous decisions, execute operations without approval, and drift in capability over time. Yet most organizations have zero observability into their AI agent infrastructure.

When developers spin up MCP servers through Claude Desktop or Cursor, security and ops teams are blind. No metrics. No traces. No logs. Just autonomous agents accessing databases, calling APIs, and modifying production systems—completely outside your observability stack.

This talk explores how to instrument AI agents and MCP servers using familiar CNCF tools. We'll cover:

• Why traditional APM fails for autonomous agents (no request/response, emergent behavior, capability drift)
• Detecting anomalies in agent behavior (statistical baselines vs. ML-driven detection)
• Correlating agent actions to business outcomes

You'll see working demos of agent observability plus open-source code for instrumenting LangChain, CrewAI, and custom agents.

Walk away with patterns to extend your existing observability stack to AI agents before they become your biggest blind spot.

Speakers

Abdel Fane

CEO & Founder, OpenA2A

Abdel is a cybersecurity architect with 17+ years of experience securing enterprise environments across healthcare, finance, and government sectors. He has led security initiatives at Grail, Booz Allen Hamilton, Protiviti, and Allstate, specializing in cloud security & DevSecOps.
... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 10:20am - 10:45am CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

11:20am CDT

[CANCELLATION] AI Training in Emerging Economies: Building Africa's Largest LLM From the Ground Up - Okikiola Oliyide, Awarri

Friday May 22, 2026 11:20am - 11:45am CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

N-ATLaS is a multilingual African-language LLM we took from research to production on Kubernetes. This talk shows the end-to-end path we used to make it reproducible, observable, and affordable: data + finetune pipelines (artifacts, seeds, checkpoints), Argo-orchestrated training on mixed GPU pools, and a serving stack with Triton + KServe tuned for real traffic. I’ll walk through SRE guardrails that mattered for N-ATLaS (SLOs, golden signals, error budgets), supply-chain hygiene (image signing, provenance, model versioning), and the levers that cut cost-per-token while improving latency and uptime under pre-emptions. We’ll cover autoscaling, caching, model rollout strategies, and incident playbooks plus what we’d change after thousands of downloads and weeks of live usage. Expect hard-learned patterns, YAML you can run, and a plain-English checklist you can lift into your own cluster; whether you’re serving English or a low-resource language model.

Speakers

work okiki

Lead DevOps Engineer, Awarri

Okikiola Oliyide is Lead Cloud DevOps Engineer at Awarri Technology, where he designs and operates large-scale Kubernetes platforms powering Africa’s largest LLM initiative. With 5+ years across AWS, GCP, and on-prem, he specialises in CI/CD, observability, and cost-efficient GPU... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 11:20am - 11:45am CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

CNCF Observability Projects

Content Experience Level Intermediate

12:05pm CDT

⚡ Lightning Talk: Observability Debt: When Telemetry Stops Telling the Truth - Spoorthi Palakshaiah, Relevance Lab

Friday May 22, 2026 12:05pm - 12:15pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

This talk introduces observability debt as an operational issue that develops over time in evolving systems. Teams often instrument services early using observability frameworks, define metrics, dashboards, alerts, and SLOs, and initially gain confidence in their ability to understand system behavior. However, production systems rarely remain static. As systems evolve through refactoring, scaling, architectural changes, asynchronous processing, and organizational shifts. Observability artifacts frequently remain unchanged, creating a mismatch between what telemetry is assumed to represent and how the system actually behaves. This mismatch, referred to as observability debt, does not result from missing data but from telemetry whose meaning has drifted due to unmaintained assumptions, leading to dashboards that appear healthy, alerts that lack context, and slower incident understanding. To make this concrete, the talk uses a minimal personal system intentionally designed to model common production patterns. Starting from a low-debt state where telemetry reflects user impact, the system evolves while observability remains static, resulting in metrics that hide localized failures.

Speakers

Spoorthi Palakshaiah

DevOps Engineer, Relevance Lab

Spoorthi is a DevOps engineer with experience designing, building, and optimizing cloud infrastructure. She works extensively with Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and open source observability tools to improve system reliability, scalability, and operational efficiency... Read More →

Observability Debt SpoorthiPalakshaiah pdf

Friday May 22, 2026 12:05pm - 12:15pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices

Content Experience Level Intermediate

12:15pm CDT

[Rescheduled] ⚡ Lightning Talk: GPU-Scanner: Extending CNCF Observability for Multi-GPU AI Workloads - Ritika Gupta, Oracle

Friday May 22, 2026 12:15pm - 12:25pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

As large language models scale across hundreds of GPUs and multi-node AI systems, they’ve become a major operational challenge for infrastructure engineers. Traditional observability tools stop at the node level, leaving GPU health and utilization invisible until workloads fail or budgets spike. Imagine a 25 day training job failing on day 23 because one GPU silently throttled!

In this session, we’ll explore GPU-Scanner, an open-source observability extension for Kubernetes GPU clusters. Built to integrate with Prometheus & OpenTelemetry, GPU-Scanner adds both active and passive GPU health checks, capturing throughput, TFLOPs, memory diagnostics, thermal consistency, and long-run stability metrics.

We’ll demo real-world failure modes like catching a GPU “off the bus” or detecting thermal throttling and show how alerts flow into your existing observability stack. Leave with a practical playbook to proactively validate GPU clusters and maximize reliability and utilization.

Speakers

Ritika Gupta

Senior SWE - AI Incubations, Oracle

With a knack for transforming chaos into seamless solutions Ritika Gupta creates technologies to bind Kubernetes, Containers and Cloud ecosystem leveraging cloud native tooling. She actively contributes to Kubernetes as an sig-windows member. Her expertise spans container orchestration... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 12:15pm - 12:25pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

Community-Driven Development in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

1:25pm CDT

Beyond Dashboards: Architecting AI Agents for Autonomous Observability - Divya Mahajan, Amazon & Achin Gupta, Intuit

Friday May 22, 2026 1:25pm - 1:50pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

The future of observability isn't better dashboards—it's AI agents that reason across metrics, logs, and traces alongside your engineering team.

Engineers spend hours correlating signals across Grafana, Kibana, and Jaeger, mentally stitching together what happened and why. What if an agent could do that correlation automatically?

This session presents a practical architecture for building observability agents that autonomously triage incidents across all three pillars. we'll demonstrate an agent that ingests an alert, queries metrics, searches logs, examines traces, identifies root causes, and recommends remediation—while keeping humans in the loop.

We'll cover:

Why observability is ideal for agentic AI
Agent architecture with LangGraph orchestration
Integration patterns: MCP, REST APIs, and OpenTelemetry
Tool design for metrics, logs, and traces
Live demo: agent triaging a simulated incident
Production considerations: reliability, cost, guardrails
Attendees leave with a working reference architecture built on CNCF ecosystem tools (Prometheus, Jaeger, Loki, Grafana). All code is open source.

Speakers

Divya Mahajan

Software Engineer, Amazon

Divya Mahajan is a Software Development Engineer at Amazon Alexa, where she builds production-grade Agentic AI and LLM systems at scale. Her work sits at the intersection of conversational AI, agentic automation, and reliable system design, with a focus on accuracy, observability... Read More →

Achin Gupta

Staff Software Engineer, Intuit

Achin Gupta is a Staff Software Engineer with 9 years of experience designing and building production grade distributed observability backends on Kubernetes. He also focuses on AI driven systems, developing LLM powered workflows and multi agent architectures, with an emphasis on observability... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 1:25pm - 1:50pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

1:55pm CDT

Breaking Free from Vendor Lock-In: Nubank DIY Observability Success - Diego Rocha, AWS & Otavio Valadares, Nubank

Friday May 22, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

Nubank is the largest digital bank outside Asia, operating in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, and serving over 120 million customers. As a cloud-native company, Nubank distributed digital environment relies on more than 4,000 microservices, generating nearly 1 petabyte of monitoring logs daily. To better manage this volume and reduce operational costs by over 50%, Nubank recently transitioned from an external vendor to an in-house log platform. In this talk, we'll share the platform architecture and the challenges encountered during the migration journey.

Speakers

Diego Rocha

Sr. Solutions Architect, AWS

Otavio Valadares

Lead Software Engineer, Nubank

Lead Software Engineer @ Nubank

Observability Summit 2026 Final pdf

Friday May 22, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

1:55pm CDT

One Size Does Not Fit All: A Polystore Architecture for Logs and Traces - Suman Karumuri, KalDB

Friday May 22, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Observability data isn't homogeneous. Security logs require needle-in-haystack searches with multi-year compliance retention. Kernel logs are uncompressible text. Structured logs enable fast aggregations, while semi-structured logs explode cardinality. Traces demand different access patterns entirely.

Modern requirements compound this. Observability must join with other data sources. Agentic AI systems generate massive volumes of unstructured and semi-structured logs and traces. Big data platforms have emerged as popular storage alternatives.

Forcing everything into one system creates impossible tradeoffs: slow queries, runaway costs, frustrated users.

At Airbnb and Slack, operating thousands of tenants across hundreds of clusters, we built a polystore architecture routing workloads to specialized engines, unified behind a single query interface. This required changes across the entire stack: instrumentation, collection, storage, and query layers.

This talk shares routing criteria, backend tradeoffs, and techniques for unified querying. Attendees will learn to optimize observability for better performance and lower costs.

Speakers

Suman Karumuri

CEO, KalDB

Suman Karumuri is Founder and CEO of KalDB and author of KalDB, an open source serverless Lucene platform. He is co-author of the OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry specification and was previously tech lead of Zipkin. Over the past decade, he has built and ran petabyte-scale log search, distributed... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 1:55pm - 2:20pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:25pm CDT

The Legend of Config: Breath of the Cluster - Henrik Rexed, Dynatrace

Friday May 22, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

Configuring Ingress, Gateway API, or service meshes in Kubernetes can feel like exploring an open world without a map : one wrong turn, and traffic vanishes. In this session, we’ll explore how to detect and prevent misconfigurations using OpenTelemetry, eBPF-based instrumentation (OBI), and enriched logs from service meshes and ingress controllers. Like a hero collecting tools to unlock new areas, we’ll show how to identify relevant data sources, parse and process their output, and apply common correlation rules to understand the impact of configuration changes. We’ll demonstrate how these techniques can be applied across observability platforms to reduce tool sprawl and improve operational efficiency. Attendees will leave with a practical, backend-agnostic approach to building a multi-source observability strategy for Kubernetes networking.

Speakers

Henrik Rexed

Cloud Native advocate & CNCF Ambassador, Dynatrace

Henrik is a Cloud Native Advocate at Dynatrace and a CNCF Ambassador . Prior to Dynatrace, Henrik has worked more than 15 years, as Performance Engineer. Henrik Rexed Is Also one of the Organizer of the conferences named WOPR, KCD Austria and the owner of the Youtube Channel Isit... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

Community-Driven Development in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:25pm CDT

Implementation of Unified Observability at Scale From Scratch - Ahmed J., Emaar

Friday May 22, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Unified observability has lately been regarded as the holy grail by some. One platform, universal observability, for everything. Usually, this would be the default, but when you are at a 30-year-old non-technical enterprise, dealing with a mixture of legacy and modern systems, it's a whole different story.

A consequence of legacy decisions, in some cases, results in having multiple observability platforms for different teams within the company, adding overhead, cost, noise, and audit complexity. This was the case at Emaar, a property developer based in Dubai, until the PE team took on the exciting project of unifying all observability into one platform. This included applications, infrastructure, network, and security. The complexity arises not just from the different data sources, but rather from the number and nature of the deployment sites. This included sites across 10 countries consisting of data centers, hotels, malls, shops, etc.

This talk will outline the experience of implementing a unified observability platform consisting of thousands of network devices, machines, and application workloads using open-source technologies that resulted in 6 figures of cost savings.

Speakers

Ahmed J.

Platform Engineer, Emaar

Ahmed is a platform engineer with a background in artificial intelligence research and development. He excels at building scalable infrastructure to deploy and manage production-grade applications and models. He co-led the orchestration of modern infrastructure and observability at... Read More →

ahmed j o11y summit na 26 pdf

Friday May 22, 2026 2:25pm - 2:50pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

End-User Case Studies

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:55pm CDT

How Observability-First Development Lets You Ship Agents in Weeks, Not Months - Anirudha Jadhav & Kevin Fallis, AWS

Friday May 22, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

Building AI agents is easy, but knowing why they fail is hard. Traditional APM tools were designed for request-response services, not autonomous agents that reason, plan, and execute multi-step workflows. When your agent makes unexpected decisions, standard metrics and traces don't tell you why.

This session introduces Eval-Driven Development, which focuses on building reliable agents through continuous observability and evaluation. Using OpenSearch AgentHealth, a new open-source platform for agent observability, we'll walk you through the full agent lifecycle of building, observing, improving, and repeating. We'll share a case study comparing two production root-cause-analysis agents. One was built with observability from day one and shipped in a 6 weeks, while the other was retrofitted later and took 12 months to reach production. You'll learn how we used agentic evaluation to score agent outputs and improve accuracy over time.

You'll walk away with patterns for instrumenting agents with OpenTelemetry, techniques for evaluating full decision sequences (not just outputs), and a framework for shortening your development timeline by building observability in from the start.

Speakers

Anirudha Jadhav

Sr. Engineering Leader, Amazon Web Services

Kevin Fallis

Principal Senior Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

Friday May 22, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

2:55pm CDT

Let Them Eat Bugs: Practical Showcase of Agentic Issue Resolution - May Walter, Hud

Friday May 22, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

What if we could move a big chunk of bug fixing and solving production issues to agentic AI? That would be so cool. In this talk we will go through the end to end process of setting up a background agentic workflow that detects production errors, finds their root causes, assesses the right solution and opens a PR - so you wake up in the morning to tasks almost fully completed for you by your loyal agent.

Together we will dive into the entire process of setting up this system that is currently running in real production environments - understanding the different tools, the infra challenges, the agentic accuracy spectrum, and more…

Speakers

May Walter

Co-Founder & CTO, Hud

May Walter is a software engineer, researcher, entrepreneur and serial CTO. She is currently Co-Founder and CTO of Hud, building a Runtime Code Sensor to bridge the gap between coding agents and production. Before Hud she was a founding CTO at Santa, and CTO at Bond (acquired by REEF... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 2:55pm - 3:20pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

AI and MCP in Observability

Content Experience Level Intermediate

3:40pm CDT

Devs, Transform (Your Data) and Roll Out!: Learning and Leveraging OTTL - Reese Lee, New Relic

Friday May 22, 2026 3:40pm - 4:05pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom A

The OpenTelemetry Collector has emerged as one of the project’s most critical pieces for ingesting and processing your app and infrastructure data, but did you know there’s even more you can do with your data before it reaches your backend?

Enter OTTL, or OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, a domain-specific language that can interact with and modify OTel data. Yes, the Collector already comes with dozens of components that can handle a wide range of data processing, BUT using OTTL in conjunction with the components enables even more powerful data manipulation.

In this session, learn about the benefits of OTTL, when to use it, and how to get started with OTTL. Get ready to explore:
* What OTTL is: A breakdown of the syntax and the underlying architecture within the OTel Collector.
* Why it’s useful: practical strategies for cost reduction (filtering noise), compliance (redacting PII), and standardization (normalizing attributes).
* How to use it: A live walkthrough of writing complex transformation statements for the transform and filter processors.

Speakers

Reese Lee

Senior Developer Relations Engineer, New Relic

Reese Lee is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at New Relic focusing on technical enablement via workshops, blog posts, documentation, and more. She is a Maintainer of the OpenTelemetry End User SIG, where she enjoys learning about interesting use cases and the different ways... Read More →

Friday May 22, 2026 3:40pm - 4:05pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom A

CNCF Observability Projects

Content Experience Level Intermediate

3:40pm CDT

Inside the Telemetry Data Plane: Constraints, Tradeoffs, and Scale - Eduardo Silva & José Lecaros, Chronosphere | A Palo Alto Networks Company

Friday May 22, 2026 3:40pm - 4:05pm CDT

Level One | Ballroom B

Modern telemetry systems often struggle not because of missing features, but because of hidden constraints in how data is buffered, scheduled, and moved through the system. This session explores the practical realities of building a telemetry data plane that must operate under extreme throughput, tight latency budgets, and strict resource limits.

Using real-world experience from developing a high-performance open source telemetry agent, we’ll examine how design tradeoffs around buffering, concurrency, and I/O shape system behavior at scale. Topics include user-space serialization strategies, adaptive buffering models, memory-mapped persistence, and multithreaded I/O coordination, along with how these choices interact with core Linux primitives such as epoll, asynchronous I/O, and zero-copy techniques.

Rather than focusing on APIs or products, this talk dives into the mechanics and constraints that determine whether a telemetry system remains predictable under load. The discussion is grounded in production lessons learned from operating at billions of events per minute and highlights patterns that apply broadly to collectors, agents, and streaming systems.

Speakers

José Lecaros

Support Engineer, Chronosphere | A Palo Alto Networks Company

He works as a Support Engineer at Chronosphere, helping both customers and the Fluent community. He's been a developer and support engineer for 20+ years.

Eduardo Silva

Distinguished Engineer, Chronosphere | A Palo Alto Networks Company

Eduardo is an entrepreneur and Software Engineer. He is one of Fluentd project maintainers and creator of Fluent Bit, a lightweight Logs, Metrics, and Traces processor.

Friday May 22, 2026 3:40pm - 4:05pm CDT
Level One | Ballroom B

Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices

Content Experience Level Intermediate

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