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CNCF Announces Schedule for Debut Observability Summit Europe

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the schedule for the first Observability Summit Europe 2026, taking place in Prague, Czechia, on 5 October.

The summit features more than 25 technical sessions, bringing together developers, site reliability engineers and platform teams to address the operational demands of scaling cloud native systems. Curated by the steering committee for architectural sophistication and practical utility, the program focuses on core subject areas including automated synthetic monitoring, Observability as Code (OaC) and the evolution of observability through AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Sessions further address strategies for scaling distributed infrastructure, community-driven standard definition, and methods for embedding telemetry into DevOps pipelines.

"As cloud native systems grow more complex and AI workloads accelerate, observability has become fundamental to maintaining reliable production environments," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF. "Observability Summit Europe creates a dedicated space for the open source community to collaborate in person, advance open standards, and build the resilient technologies that modern infrastructure requires."

Highlights of Observability Summit Europe 2026

AI and MCP in Observability

AI and MCP are shifting how teams approach observability. Sessions in this track examine how open source tooling and emerging AI-powered workflows accelerate troubleshooting, automate operations and provide deeper insights into complex systems.

Highlight Session: Your Agent Did What? Forensic Observability for Systems That Don't Leave Obvious Footprints - Adriana Villela, Dynatrace & Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0

CNCF Observability Projects

This track features the latest innovations across CNCF observability projects, including Cortex, Fluentd, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos and more. Attendees can expect technical deep-dives, production-ready use cases and contributor-led updates on integrations, best practices and real-world implementations.

Highlight Session: OpenTelemetry Beyond Observability: Security, CI/CD, and Network Management - Antoine Toulme, Cisco

End-User Case Studies

Real-world implementations showcase how organizations successfully scale open source observability technologies. In this track, presenters will share practical architectures, deployment strategies, lessons learned and measurable business outcomes.

Highlight Session: Poisoning the Well: Security Lessons from Vulnerability Research in Telemetry Pipelines - Shuva Jyoti Kar, Palo Alto Networks & Aditi Gupta, JioHotstar (prev. Disney+ Hotstar)

The Latest

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...

CNCF Announces Schedule for Debut Observability Summit Europe

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the schedule for the first Observability Summit Europe 2026, taking place in Prague, Czechia, on 5 October.

The summit features more than 25 technical sessions, bringing together developers, site reliability engineers and platform teams to address the operational demands of scaling cloud native systems. Curated by the steering committee for architectural sophistication and practical utility, the program focuses on core subject areas including automated synthetic monitoring, Observability as Code (OaC) and the evolution of observability through AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Sessions further address strategies for scaling distributed infrastructure, community-driven standard definition, and methods for embedding telemetry into DevOps pipelines.

"As cloud native systems grow more complex and AI workloads accelerate, observability has become fundamental to maintaining reliable production environments," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF. "Observability Summit Europe creates a dedicated space for the open source community to collaborate in person, advance open standards, and build the resilient technologies that modern infrastructure requires."

Highlights of Observability Summit Europe 2026

AI and MCP in Observability

AI and MCP are shifting how teams approach observability. Sessions in this track examine how open source tooling and emerging AI-powered workflows accelerate troubleshooting, automate operations and provide deeper insights into complex systems.

Highlight Session: Your Agent Did What? Forensic Observability for Systems That Don't Leave Obvious Footprints - Adriana Villela, Dynatrace & Kasper Borg Nissen, Dash0

CNCF Observability Projects

This track features the latest innovations across CNCF observability projects, including Cortex, Fluentd, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Thanos and more. Attendees can expect technical deep-dives, production-ready use cases and contributor-led updates on integrations, best practices and real-world implementations.

Highlight Session: OpenTelemetry Beyond Observability: Security, CI/CD, and Network Management - Antoine Toulme, Cisco

End-User Case Studies

Real-world implementations showcase how organizations successfully scale open source observability technologies. In this track, presenters will share practical architectures, deployment strategies, lessons learned and measurable business outcomes.

Highlight Session: Poisoning the Well: Security Lessons from Vulnerability Research in Telemetry Pipelines - Shuva Jyoti Kar, Palo Alto Networks & Aditi Gupta, JioHotstar (prev. Disney+ Hotstar)

The Latest

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

Top-performing businesses prioritize data-driven decision making, enabling leaders to move from intuition and gut feel towards evidence-based judgment. But that judgment is only sound when the data underpinning decisions is accurate. With incident management, data accuracy is particularly important. Long-term revenue, customer trust, and operational stability depend on high-quality data that enables teams to quickly identify and address the root cause of major incidents. Against this backdrop, governance becomes a critical endeavor to ensure the right data drives the right action ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 26, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network compliance ... 

Most production autonomous agents do not run in a vacuum. They run inside cloud infrastructure: virtual machines, containers, pods, managed clusters or private servers. That is where most operations teams start monitoring. Is the VM alive? Is the container running? Did the pod restart? Is memory stable? Is CPU too high? Did the health check pass? Those signals are useful. They tell you whether the shell around the agent is alive. They do not tell you whether the agent inside is actually operational ...