Observability Sessions Boston 2026
Table of Contents
Grafana Labs regional half-day in Boston, September 9, 2026. Framed as "a blueprint for observability in the AI era" — AI as both new production risk (LLMs and agents that can pass every technical check and still be wrong) and new tool (Grafana Assistant, natural-language queries, AI-assisted incident response).
Positioned as the leader-facing cut of the same argument ObservabilityCON 2026 carries at flagship scale — half a day, strategy rather than deep dive.
1. Facts
- Date: September 9, 2026
- Location: Convene One Boston Place, 201 Washington St, Boston, MA 02108
- Format: half-day (1:00 PM – 6:30 PM including reception)
- Sponsor: Google Cloud
- URL: grafana.com/events/obsessions/boston
2. Agenda
- 1:30 PM — Opening; state-of-observability survey data (Grafana Labs)
- 2:00 PM — Six Essentials of Observability Success (Ashley Somerville, Grafana Labs) — leadership + strategy framing
- 2:30 PM — Pega Cloud: from Blueprint to production (Satya Mishra, Pega) — observability for AWS+GCP-hosted, thousands-of-tenant AI-generated enterprise apps; incident-response + adaptive-metrics + Grafana as central pane
- 3:30 PM — Monitoring with AI (Brian Murphy, Grafana Labs) — Grafana Assistant demo; natural-language queries, root-cause acceleration
- 4:00 PM — Cyvl: SLOs when your users are city councils (John Pignato, Cyvl) — OTel instrumentation of a LiDAR/ML pipeline across 500+ cities; Adaptive Metrics cut cost 73%; 30–40% per-job compute reduction
- 4:30 PM — Why you need Agent Observability (Steven Hannah, Grafana Labs) — the distinction the note above turns on: "healthy" ≠ "correct" for LLM-powered systems; production evaluation, tool-call tracing, guardrails
- 5:00 PM — Grafana Labs's vision for observability's future
- 5:30 PM — Networking (hosted by Google Cloud)
3. Why to attend
The Pega and Cyvl case studies are the reason. Pega is observability-at-tenant-scale in a regulated industry (thousands of enterprise tenants, billions of interactions/year); Cyvl is observability where the SLO is a municipal budget cycle rather than a p99 latency target. Both are unusual enough to be worth an afternoon of travel from anyone within reach of Boston.
The Agent Observability talk is the same axis ObservabilityCON 2026 frames in October; Boston is a chance to see the shorter version months earlier.
4. Placeholder note
This entry was scaffolded from the Grafana event page on 2026-09-08 (day before). Fill in with attendance notes if attended; leave as a directory pointer to the primary source otherwise.