Posted on September 24, 2026 by Austin Parker, Iris Dyrmishi, Eduardo Silva Pereira, and Juraci Paixão Kröhling Observability Day returns to KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America on November 9, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah, bringing together maintainers, operators, and end users from across the CNCF observability community. Observability has reached an important transition point. OpenTelemetry graduated within CNCF in May 2026, established projects continue to evolve, and teams are applying these technologies to new challenges including AI workloads, telemetry cost, scale, and data quality.
Observability Day provides a vendor-neutral place for maintainers and practitioners to compare approaches and learn how the wider ecosystem is responding. Observability Day traces its roots to FluentCon, first held as a co-located event at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2022 in Valencia, Spain, for the Fluentd and Fluent Bit communities. Later that year, Open Observability Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America broadened the gathering to include maintainers and community members from projects including Jaeger, Fluentd, Thanos, Prometheus, and OpenTelemetry, laying the foundation for Observability Day.
Cloud native observability already had strong individual project communities, but there was an opportunity to create a shared forum where those communities — and the practitioners combining their projects in production — could learn from one another. The event grew from that opportunity, connecting maintainers, operators, platform teams, and end users around interoperability, real operational challenges, and the direction of open source observability as a whole. Observability Day concentrates on vendor-neutral, cross-project observability rather than centering the discussion on a single project.
The event brings together people building and maintaining CNCF observability projects with people operating observability systems in production. This creates space to examine not only individual technologies but also how instrumentation, telemetry pipelines, storage, correlation, and operations fit together across modern cloud native environments. The official 2026 program spans project internals, cross-project architectures, the data engineering required to make telemetry useful and affordable, and emerging areas including AI and agent observability, eBPF-based instrumenta