Observability Day: Where the community comes together at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026

Observability Day returns to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America on November 9, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah, bringing together maintainers, operators, and end users from across the CNCF observability community.

Observability has reached an important transition point. OpenTelemetry graduated within CNCF in May 2026, established projects continue to evolve, and teams are applying these technologies to new challenges including AI workloads, telemetry cost, scale, and data quality. Observability Day provides a vendor-neutral place for maintainers and practitioners to compare approaches and learn how the wider ecosystem is responding.

From FluentCon to Observability Day

Observability Day traces its roots to FluentCon, first held as a co-located event at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain, for the Fluentd and Fluent Bit communities. Later that year, Open Observability Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America broadened the gathering to include maintainers and community members from projects including Jaeger, Fluentd, Thanos, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry, laying the foundation for Observability Day.

Cloud native observability already had strong individual project communities, but there was an opportunity to create a shared forum where those communities — and the practitioners combining their projects in production — could learn from one another.

The event grew from that opportunity, connecting maintainers, operators, platform teams, and end users around interoperability, real operational challenges, and the direction of open source observability as a whole.

Why Observability Day?

Observability Day concentrates on vendor-neutral, cross-project observability rather than centering the discussion on a single project.

The event brings together people building and maintaining CNCF observability projects with people operating observability systems in production. This creates space to examine not only individual technologies but also how instrumentation, telemetry pipelines, storage, correlation, and operations fit together across modern cloud native environments.

The official 2026 program spans project internals, cross-project architectures, the data engineering required to make telemetry useful and affordable, and emerging areas including AI and agent observability, eBPF-based instrumentation, and CI/CD and platform telemetry.

For the wider KubeCon + CloudNativeCon community, Observability Day provides an opportunity to explore these topics through real architectures, operational experience, technical trade-offs, and open source technologies.

What to expect

Observability Day takes place on November 9 as part of the CNCF-hosted co-located events at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.

The program brings together maintainers, operators, and end users from projects including Prometheus, Fluentd and Fluent Bit, OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, Thanos, Cortex, Perses, Pixie, Kepler, Inspektor Gadget, and the wider observability ecosystem.

The day is focused on experience-driven content and the practical realities of observing, debugging, and operating cloud native systems at scale.

Attendees will have an opportunity to hear how different communities and practitioners are approaching observability challenges, understand technical and architectural trade-offs, and connect with others working across the open source observability ecosystem.

Observability and Cloud Native AI

Unsurprisingly, Observability is the event’s primary cloud native theme. Sessions explore areas including project internals, production deployments, telemetry pipelines, cost and data quality, eBPF-based instrumentation, and cross-project architectures.

Cloud Native AI is also an increasingly relevant theme. As AI workloads and agents become part of cloud native environments, understanding their behavior introduces new observability questions alongside familiar concerns around performance, reliability, scale, and cost.

The official Observability Day program reflects this evolution, with AI and agent observability among the emerging areas being explored by the community.

What can attendees take away?

Attendees should leave with practical perspectives and trade-offs that they can apply to production systems, as well as a clearer understanding of how different parts of the open source observability ecosystem fit together.

The event provides opportunities to learn from real architectures and operational experience, including approaches to telemetry pipelines, data quality and cost, instrumentation, observability at scale, and emerging approaches to AI and agent observability.

Attendees should also gain a broader picture of how CNCF observability projects complement one another and how the ecosystem is evolving as requirements change.

Who should attend?

Observability Day is especially relevant to site reliability engineers, platform engineers, developers, and observability practitioners responsible for production systems, as well as maintainers and contributors who want to exchange knowledge directly with users.

Practitioners already operating observability systems at scale can explore deeper architectural and implementation trade-offs, while newcomers can use the event to better understand the projects, technologies, and communities that make up the cloud native observability ecosystem.

No specific preparation is required. Familiarity with Kubernetes, distributed systems, and the basic roles of metrics, logs, traces, and telemetry pipelines can help attendees follow deeper technical discussions.

Attendees should also review the final schedule in advance to identify the sessions and speakers most relevant to their work.

Strengthening the observability community

Observability Day brings project maintainers, contributors, operators, and end users together, creating opportunities for direct feedback between those who build open source observability technologies and those who depend on them.

By encouraging discussion across project boundaries, the event gives practitioners a place to share production experience, helps maintainers understand how their projects are being used together, and gives newcomers opportunities to discover projects and communities where they can participate.

That cross-project exchange is particularly valuable as observability continues to evolve. OpenTelemetry’s graduation, the continued development of established CNCF observability projects, and emerging challenges around AI, scale, cost, and data quality all reinforce the importance of collaboration across the ecosystem.

Join Observability Day on November 9, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.

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