Recap: Attending GrafanaCon 2024 in Amsterdam

Went to GrafanaCon 2024 in Amsterdam, July 7-10. First time attending in person after years of watching remotely. My colleague and I took the train from Hamburg — direct connection, easy trip.

We arrived Monday evening, checked in, and went out for food and beer.

The conference

The venue was the Muziekgebouw on Piet Heinkade, right on the water. About 300-400 attendees, which felt like a good size — small enough to actually talk to people.

The opening keynote was from Raj Dutt (CEO) and Torkel Ödegaard (Grafana’s creator). They ran through new features and did the Grafana Grot awards, where community members showed off their dashboards. Someone had one tracking health data on an Apple Watch, another one was for parental controls. Good fun.

The talk I liked most was Satoshi Nakahira from JAXA showing how they used Grafana to monitor Japan’s SLIM moon lander in real time. Not your typical Grafana use case.

Owen Diehl and Cyril Tovena from Grafana Labs presented Loki 3.0, which now has native OTel support and bloom filter query acceleration. They’re positioning it as a more general-purpose tool — higher scale, less complexity, lower cost.

Dolf Noordman and Frank Van Boven from Heineken talked about monitoring their 83 breweries with Grafana, which was a good example of what this looks like at enterprise scale.

Announcements

Grafana 11.0 — the big one for me is Explore Metrics, which I want to start using at work. They also added AI-generated titles and descriptions for panels and dashboards.

AngularJS plugin deprecation — Mihaela Maior and Mitch Seaman explained the timeline. AngularJS plugins are disabled by default in Grafana 11, and support drops entirely in Grafana 12. You can still enable them temporarily.

Grafana Alloy — an open source OpenTelemetry collector with built-in Prometheus pipelines. Supports metrics, logs, traces, and profiles. Compatible with Prometheus scraping rules, ServiceMonitors, and PodMonitors.

Grafana Application Platform (GAP) — a new framework for building custom data sources, panels, and apps within Grafana. Takes a Kubernetes-like approach to resource management.

Alerting overhaul — they’re deprecating the old alerting system from Grafana 4.0 and replacing it with something unified. The session walked through the history of alerting in Grafana (it’s been messy) and what the new system will look like.

Summary

The second day had an “unconference” segment where attendees proposed and led their own discussions, which worked well.

Good conference. The right size, good talks, and I came back with a list of things to try.