GrafanaCON 2026

Last week I attended my first GrafanaCON in Barcelona, a conference I've always wanted to attend.

GrafanaCON is an annual conference dedicated to the Grafana products and open source projects.

The conference is held in North America and Europe in alternating years, and to me a trip to North America for a two day conference is a bit much I've had to wait for the Europe conference to fit my schedule which it did this time.

The conference was held in beautiful Barcelona at Palau de Congressos de Catalunya which is situated west of the city centre. It's near to Barcelona F.C's Camp Nou football stadium with mostly residential areas surrounding.

The venue had a expo hall with an Ask the experts bar (or more of a circle) right in the middle, and with different expos divided into a community area, sponsors and Grafana science fair.

A nice area which was buzzing with people between the sessions. In the community area there was a Grafana champion booth where I finally got to meet Ewa Magiera in person for the first time. Ewa is running the champion program for GrafanaLabs.

All the sessions were held in the main auditorium, meaning one wouldn't miss any talk which might be an issue with multiple breakout rooms. However, since sessions were mostly grouped in blocks of three, you had to sit through all of them unless you wanted to leave in the middle of a session.

The conference had a day 0 on the Monday with hands-on labs happening at the venue which I didn't attend, whereas the main conference started at Tuesday and ended on Wednesday. The two days both started at 9 AM and ended around 6 PM.

The first day started with the opening keynote where Raj Dutt and Torkel Ödegaard discussed the state of Grafana and talked about the three pillars that GrafanaLabs focuses on; Easier to get started, Built for scale, Available everywhere.

The theme of easier to get started was showcased where the point is to get value from the data in seconds utilizing pre-built dashboards and also dynamic dashboards.

As usual the next version of Grafana was announced, Grafana 13. A release with lots of new and improved features which I plan to write a follow up on. One of the biggest announcements was that Grafana Assistant now is available also in the OSS version which is huge. Still you need to have a connection to Grafana cloud as the LLMs is running there, but they provide Assistant for free for 3 users which is very nice.

AI was of course a big part of the conference, both with Grafana Assistant, but also with the AI Observability feature in Grafana Cloud which can monitor AI agents, and with O11y benchmark which is open sourced by GrafanaLabs

The conference also discussed new features in the other GrafanaLabs projects, for example:

• Loki 3.x will get a new Kafka backed ingestion which separates the ingestion and querying, allowing for a huge improvement in scalability
• Tempo will also use Kafka in the backend
• The k6 project will deliver AI-assisted testing in the 2.0 release
• A new Marketplace was announced where plugins can be published, and where vendors and developers can monetize on their plugins

All announcements can be found in this Announcements post from GrafanaLabs

Of course, there was also a few sessions from people outside GrafanaLabs. Both 30-minute sessions where the likes of Lego, Digi4Eco, Python software foundation, Irish rail and others, as well as shorter 10-minute lightning talks. Some very interesting solutions built out there which gave ideas for my own projects. Hopefully the recording of the sessions will be available soon.

The Golden Grot awards were announced, this year with two new categories. Very inspiring to see all the winners and their solutions.

The logistics, food and facilities were all great. Even with around 500 attendees it never felt crowded and things ran very smoothly.

The community party on day 1 was a nice break from the sessions with lots of discussions with people in the community.

At the closing of the event I was surprised to see that they wanted the Grafana champions up on stage together with the speakers and the Golden grot award winners. A nice end of the conference to get to be up on stage!

Summary

All in all I was very pleased with the conference. One thing that strucked me was the lack of sales pitches and marketing fuzz that other conferences tend to be full of. I knew this was a community, open source, focused event, but I had actually expected more "sales" than it was. Of course, Grafana Cloud was mentioned quite a bit, but still the focus was on the OSS versions.

Truly inspiring to see what Grafana has become over the years and with their firm ground in OSS and community I expect it to keep growing for years to come.