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CNCF Announces OpenObservabilityCon North America

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the opening of the Call for Papers (CFP) for OpenObservabilityCon, a new one-day event taking place June 26, 2025 in Denver, Colorado. 

Hosted by CNCF as a co-located event at Open Source Summit North America, OpenObservabilityCon is taking place with OpenTelemetry Community Day.

According to CNCF's 2025 Tech Radar Report, observability tools like Cortex, Fluentd, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Thanos are consistently ranked in the "Adopt" or "Trial" rings, underscoring their widespread and growing use across cloud native environments. The growing reliance on observability to ensure application resilience and business continuity highlights the need for dedicated events like OpenObservabilityCon.

"Observability has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have for modern software teams," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "Organizations can't afford downtime, blind spots, or brittleness in today's competitive landscape. As organizations grow and complexity increases, teams need high-signal, low-noise insights to maintain performance, optimize costs, and reduce risk. This event is about creating a dedicated space to bring together the open source observability community in a vendor neutral way to push observability forward."

OpenObservabilityCon creates a focused space for practitioners and contributors to share best practices, align on standards, and explore emerging trends like AI-driven observability. By connecting the broader open source observability ecosystem with the OpenTelemetry community, the event helps organizations simplify tooling, reduce operational risk, and improve system reliability through practical collaboration and real-world insights.

Observability was a major focus at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, where packed sessions explored everything from the evolution of OpenTelemetry to the growing roles of eBPF and AI in streamlining observability pipelines. Discussions throughout the event underscored a shared urgency: the need for clearer standards, better tooling education, and more actionable insights in complex distributed environments.

Proposals to speak at OpenObservabilityCon are being accepted now through May 11 at 11:59 PM MDT. Suggested topics include:

  • Innovations in Open Source Observability
  • Scalability Challenges and Solutions
  • Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices
  • Community-Driven Development in Observability
  • The Future of Open Source Observability
  • End-User Case Studies
  • CNCF observability projects like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Fluentd, Jaeger, Thanos, Cortex, etc

Early bird registration is live and offered at US$199 through May 16, which represents a savings of US$200. A reduced registration rate is available for current full time students and faculty.

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

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Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

CNCF Announces OpenObservabilityCon North America

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, announced the opening of the Call for Papers (CFP) for OpenObservabilityCon, a new one-day event taking place June 26, 2025 in Denver, Colorado. 

Hosted by CNCF as a co-located event at Open Source Summit North America, OpenObservabilityCon is taking place with OpenTelemetry Community Day.

According to CNCF's 2025 Tech Radar Report, observability tools like Cortex, Fluentd, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Thanos are consistently ranked in the "Adopt" or "Trial" rings, underscoring their widespread and growing use across cloud native environments. The growing reliance on observability to ensure application resilience and business continuity highlights the need for dedicated events like OpenObservabilityCon.

"Observability has shifted from a nice-to-have to a must-have for modern software teams," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. "Organizations can't afford downtime, blind spots, or brittleness in today's competitive landscape. As organizations grow and complexity increases, teams need high-signal, low-noise insights to maintain performance, optimize costs, and reduce risk. This event is about creating a dedicated space to bring together the open source observability community in a vendor neutral way to push observability forward."

OpenObservabilityCon creates a focused space for practitioners and contributors to share best practices, align on standards, and explore emerging trends like AI-driven observability. By connecting the broader open source observability ecosystem with the OpenTelemetry community, the event helps organizations simplify tooling, reduce operational risk, and improve system reliability through practical collaboration and real-world insights.

Observability was a major focus at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2025, where packed sessions explored everything from the evolution of OpenTelemetry to the growing roles of eBPF and AI in streamlining observability pipelines. Discussions throughout the event underscored a shared urgency: the need for clearer standards, better tooling education, and more actionable insights in complex distributed environments.

Proposals to speak at OpenObservabilityCon are being accepted now through May 11 at 11:59 PM MDT. Suggested topics include:

  • Innovations in Open Source Observability
  • Scalability Challenges and Solutions
  • Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices
  • Community-Driven Development in Observability
  • The Future of Open Source Observability
  • End-User Case Studies
  • CNCF observability projects like OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Fluentd, Jaeger, Thanos, Cortex, etc

Early bird registration is live and offered at US$199 through May 16, which represents a savings of US$200. A reduced registration rate is available for current full time students and faculty.

The Latest

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 23, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses the NetOps labor shortage ... 

Technology management is evolving, and in turn, so is the scope of FinOps. The FinOps Foundation recently updated their mission statement from "advancing the people who manage the value of cloud" to "advancing the people who manage the value of technology." This seemingly small change solidifies a larger evolution: FinOps practitioners have organically expanded to be focused on more than just cloud cost optimization. Today, FinOps teams are largely — and quickly — expanding their job descriptions, evolving into a critical function for managing the full value of technology ...

Enterprises are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

The observability industry has an evolving relationship with AI. We're not skeptics, but it's clear that trust in AI must be earned ... In Grafana Labs' annual Observability Survey, 92% said they see real value in AI surfacing anomalies before they cause downtime. Another 91% endorsed AI for forecasting and root cause analysis. So while the demand is there, customers need it to be trustworthy, as the survey also found that the practitioners most enthusiastic about AI are also the most insistent on explainability ...

In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.