Autumn of Observability

Fall into Observability: Grafana, SLOs & Kubernetes Join us for an evening of practical talks about Grafana, Kubernetes, SLOs, and platform observability. Jude Bakeer and Steven Hannah from Grafana Labs will join us! As well as short talks from the following folks: Building Workload-Aware SLO Dashboards for Mixed Kubernetes Workloads (Goutham K., SWE II @ Akamai) Modern Kubernetes platforms often support very different kinds of workloads, including interactive APIs, long-running reasoning requests, asynchronous processing, and batch jobs. Yet teams frequently monitor them through the same dashboards and reliability thresholds. In this talk, I’ll show how to build workload-aware SLO dashboards in Grafana by separating latency by workload class, defining workload-specific good and bad events, calculating error-budget burn rates, using multi-window alerting, and correlating reliability degradation with deployments. I’ll also compare a manual PromQL-based approach with Grafana Cloud SLOs using a Synthetic Monitoring example. Grafana for Platform Teams: Every Kubernetes Cluster, Every Region, One Dashboard (Sai Joshitha Kathari) Internal developer platforms (IDPs) do not just run workloads. They provision and reconcile entire Kubernetes clusters for other teams across regions. When a platform control plane manages hundreds of those clusters, the SRE question tends to be: which cluster is stuck, at which step, and who owns it? This talk shows how we built a single Grafana dashboard that answers that question. We’ll cover which telemetry actually matters at fleet scale, including cluster health, ownership, region, version, and capacity, and, just as importantly, what we chose to leave out. Practical, demo-driven, and useful to anyone running Kubernetes-based platforms. Live Demo: GCX and Agents (Matthew Fine, Silicon Labs) We’ll also include a live demo using GCX and Agents, bringing the ideas from both talks together with real Grafana workflows and examples.