Insights at KubeCon Europe 2024: Red Hat's observability sessions

KubeCon Europe 2024 is just around the corner—March 18-22, 2024—and the lineup of sessions promises to be nothing short of extraordinary. Whether you're a seasoned Kubernetes professional or just diving into the world of container orchestration, these sessions will provide valuable insights, practical tips and a deeper understanding of key topics in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

There are plenty of sessions you won’t want to miss on observability at KubeCon and co-located events, OpenShift Commons and Observability Day, taking place on March 19. Here, we have aggregated all observability sessions by Red Hatters for your convenience. Enjoy!

1. Finding Needles in the Observability Haystack

• Speakers: Ivan Nečas & Katya Gordeeva, Red Hat
• When and where: Tuesday March 19, 2024 09:25 - 09:50 CET (Level 7.3 | Room N01 - N02)

Dive deeper into Kubernetes monitoring with this talk, where Ivan and Katya go beyond the basics and explore what comes next. Learn how to enhance your monitoring stack by incorporating advanced techniques and tools. The speakers will demonstrate how to integrate Prometheus/Thanos for alerts while seamlessly adding logs to the mix. Discover how data science techniques can be applied to time-series data, from analytics to AI/ML, to gain deeper insights into your cluster's performance. With a focus on practicality, they will share specific tricks, visualizations and tools to help you manage the influx of metrics, alerts and logs effectively. Plus, access to content in a repository can enable you to leverage valuable strategies for tackling Kubernetes data overload. 

2. Is Serverless Powerfully Powerless?

• Speakers: Jose Gomez-Selles & Kevin Dubois, Red Hat
• When and where: Wednesday March 20, 2024 11:15 - 11:50 CET (Pavilion 7 | Level 7.1 | Room A)

Unlock the truth about the environmental benefits of serverless solutions like Knative. Join Jose and Kevin where they will delve into the real data behind CPU cycles, RAM consumption and energy savings. With the power of tools like Kepler, they will measure energy consumption of nodes and workloads, shedding light on whether serverless truly lives up to its reputation for efficiency. Don't miss this opportunity to discover if serverless architecture is not only cost-effective but also environmentally friendly. Let's separate fact from fiction and uncover the reality of serverless energy savings.

3. Distributed Tracing with Jaeger and OpenTelemetry

• Speakers: Pavol Loffay, Red Hat & Jonah Kowall, Aiven
• When and where: Wednesday March 20, 2024 12:10 - 12:45 CET (Pavilion 7 | Level 7.3 | N03)

Join Pavol and Jonah for an immersive session on Jaeger, where they will unravel the intricacies of distributed tracing and its significance in contrast to other telemetry signals such as metrics and logs. Witness a live Jaeger demo to grasp the platform's features firsthand, empowering you to harness its capabilities effectively. Delve deeper into service performance monitoring and gain insights into the future of Jaeger as we progress towards our next major version, v2, and enhance integration with the OpenTelemetry project. They will also discuss the project roadmap and opportunities to engage with the project, including our expanding LFX mentorship program. 

4. Tutorial: Exploring the Power of Distributed Tracing with OpenTelemetry on Kubernetes

• Speakers: Pavol Loffay & Benedikt Bongartz, Red Hat; Matej Gera, Coralogix; Anthony Mirabella, AWS; Anusha Reddy Narapureddy, Apple
• When and where: Thursday March 21, 2024 14:30 - 16:00 CET (Pavilion 7 | Level 7.3 | N01-02)

Navigating the complexities of implementing observability solutions can be challenging. Join this in-depth tutorial as Red Hatters, along with other experts, guide you through deploying a comprehensive distributed tracing stack on Kubernetes using the powerful OpenTelemetry project. From manual and auto-instrumentation to extending and transforming spans with OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL), tail-based sampling and integrating with proxies/service meshes - they will cover it all. Learn how to collect and derive valuable metrics from traces, ensuring your architecture is effective, robust and easy to maintain. After this session, you'll master the OpenTelemetry API/SDK, auto-instrumentation, collector and operator, empowering you to confidently roll out a fully functional distributed tracing stack on Kubernetes.

5. Prometheus Update from the Maintainers

• Speakers: Bryan Boreham, Grafana Labs & Simon Pasquier, Red Hat
• When and where: Thursday March 21, 2024 17:25 - 18:00 CET (Pavilion 7 | Level 7.3 | W02-03)

Join Bryan and Simon to explore the latest advancements in Prometheus, the renowned open source systems monitoring system and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) graduated project. Discover the improved performance, OpenTelemetry integration and native histograms that are revolutionizing monitoring capabilities. Be the first to hear about the exciting plans for version 3.0 and gain insights into Prometheus' vibrant ecosystem, featuring Alertmanager, client libraries for multiple languages, Prometheus Operator for Kubernetes and an array of Exporters for raw data provision. Whether you're a seasoned Prometheus user or keen to learn more, this session promises valuable insights and ample opportunity for questions. 

6. Thanos’ Infinity Stones and How You Can Operate Them!

• Speakers: Saswata Mukherjee & Daniel Mohr, Red Hat
• When and where: Friday March 22, 2024 11:00 - 11:35 CET (Pavilion 7 | Level 7.3 | N04)

Discover the power of Thanos, the premier open source monitoring solution for Prometheus-based metrics. This single binary simplifies large-scale infrastructure monitoring, offering long-term retention and efficient querying. Unleash the full potential of your metrics with Thanos, enabling advanced telemetry systems, predictive modeling and personalized developer platforms. Join Daniel and Saswata in this session to explore emerging solutions within the Thanos community, gain insights into their implementations at Red Hat and be the first to hear about the open source Thanos Operator initiative, making automation effortless.

Wrap up

KubeCon EU 2024 promises to be a landmark event, and these sessions are just a glimpse of the knowledge and expertise that will be shared. Whether you're a developer, operator, or just passionate about Kubernetes, mark your calendars for these insightful sessions that will undoubtedly elevate your understanding of the ever-evolving Kubernetes ecosystem. See you there!

Discover more about Red Hat Observability components and upcoming developments at https://redhat.com/observability. We value your feedback, which is crucial for enhancing our products. Please share your questions and recommendations with us using the Red Hat OpenShift feedback form.