Grafana's Big Tent

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, host Mat Ryer is joined by Donia Chaiehloudj (Isovalent), Charles Korn (Grafana Labs), and Bryan Boreham (Grafana Labs) to break down how to make Go applications observable from day one. The discussion covers logs, slog, tracing with context, errors, pprof, continuous profiling, and eBPF. 

Cyril Tovena, principal engineer who built the Grafana Assistant; Manoj Acharya, VP of Engineering with expertise in knowledge-graph observability; Spiros Xanthos, founder of Resolve AI working on agentic troubleshooting. They discuss agentic AI running alongside engineers. Topics include automated root cause analysis, knowledge and context graphs, agents crafting production queries, pricing and privacy tradeoffs, and trust-building for autonomous actions.

Ted Young, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and observability expert, shares the project's origins and why standardizing telemetry matters. He discusses tracing versus logs, context propagation challenges, semantic conventions for structured telemetry, and the push toward zero-touch installation and auto-instrumentation. Short, technical, and forward-looking conversation about making telemetry easier to adopt.

Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Grafana creator, Torkel Ödegaard, and Grafana Labs' Distinguished Engineer, Ryan McKinley, to unpack Grafana 12’s biggest shifts and experiments. Topics include the new dashboard API and Git sync workflows for dashboards as code, dynamic/constraint-based layouts and conditional panels, SQL expressions for joining query results, and the new assistant sidebar. They also reflect on Grafana’s history,  how ease of use and looking “cool” helped adoption, and practical guidance for teams operating at scale.

Hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback welcome Grafana engineers Sven Großmann, Alexa Vargas Ortega, and Lukasz Gut for a deep dive into Grafana’s internal hackathons. They discuss ideation, team formation, tooling (including AI-assisted coding), and the path from hackathon prototype to product feature — plus the occasional bird- and board-game tangent. 

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Marco Pracucci (Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Labs), Cyril Tovena (Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Labs, and Ryan Worl (Co-founder, WarpStream) to unpack the next-generation architecture for Grafana Mimir. They discuss why decoupling the read and write paths matters, how Kafka-style partition guarantees change the game, and why replication-factor-three had become a costly bottleneck. Along the way: multi-AZ realities, object storage “loopholes,” and what new flexibility unlocks across the Grafana stack.

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Julius Volz, co-creator of Prometheus and founder of PromLabs, and Richi "RichiH" Hartmann, Prometheus maintainer and Senior Developer Programs Director at Grafana Labs, to unpack Prometheus 3.0. They trace Prometheus back to its beginnings at SoundCloud, where Julius and his colleagues were trying to recreate the magic of Google’s Borgmon. The group dives into why Prometheus stuck with a text-based exposition format, what’s new in 3.0 — including performance gains, revamped UI, UTF-8 support, and native histograms — and how it fits alongside OpenTelemetry. Along the way, they explore governance changes, future directions, and why emojis are now valid in metric names.

Recorded live at GrafanaCon Seattle, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie kick off Season 3 of Grafana’s Big Tent by welcoming Ivana Huckova (Staff Software Engineer, Grafana Labs), Andrew McCalip (Head of Research and Development, Varda Space Industries), and Brad Fitzpatrick (Chief Engineer, Tailscale). They swap first-tinkering stories and laugh through IoT wins and fails (dog happiness monitors, candle sensors—oops). Andrew explains how his self-righting, foam-filled autonomous boat survives the open seas, while Brad shares how he uses AI to 3D-print OpenSCAD parts on demand.

In the season two finale, hosts Tom Wilkie and Mat Ryer are joined by Richard "RichiH" Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs, and Pavel Strobl of Prusa Research to explore the intersection of 3D printing and observability. Prusa Research not only produces 3D printers that both Tom and Richi use to create everything from wind tunnels to miniature Grots, but the company also uses Grafana internally for their own systems, making this a dynamic conversation about how Grafana is being used to monitor and improve physical manufacturing processes as well as IT infrastructure.

Daniel Gomez Blanco, a Principal Engineer at Skyscanner, and Juraci Paixão Kröhling from Grafana Labs, delve into the fascinating evolution of OpenTelemetry. They recount the origin of its name and share insights on governance and effective monitoring. The duo discusses the challenges of implementing observability in software development and the importance of agile collaboration within the OpenTelemetry community. They also explore advancements in profiling and the integration of resource attributes, highlighting their impact on debugging practices.