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.
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