Grafana's Big Tent
Grafana's Big Tent is a podcast from Grafana Labs, the company behind the open-source analytics and visualization platform. Each episode focuses on observability — the practice of understanding system behavior through metrics, logs, and traces. The show highlights the people, community, tools, and technologies shaping modern monitoring and data visualization. It features interviews, discussions, and insights aimed at developers, DevOps engineers, and tech enthusiasts.
Episodes
The AI Software Engineering Revolution, feat. Anthropic
In this episode of Grafana's Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer (Senior Director of AI, Grafana Labs) and Tom Wilkie (CTO, Grafana Labs) sit down with Eric Burns, Field Executive Architect at Anthropic, to talk about building trust between tech and business execs, why Anthropic bet early on running across every major cloud, and what it was like watching large language models go from "interesting" t
Building Better Go Systems with Logs, Context, and Profiling
In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, host Mat Ryer is joined by Donia Chaiehloudj (Isovalent), Charles Korn (Grafana Labs), and Bryan Boreham (Grafana Labs) to break down how to make Go applications observable from day one. The discussion covers logs, slog, tracing with context, errors, pprof, continuous profiling, and eBPF.
Agents in Production: The Future of AI-Driven Observability
In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, host Tom Wilkie is joined by Spiros Xanthos (Founder & CEO, Resolve AI), Manoj Acharya (VP of Engineering at Grafana Labs), and Cyril Tovena (Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Assistant team) to explore the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI in production systems. They dig into automated root cause analysis, knowledge graphs, and how AI agen
The Evolution of OpenTelemetry with Co-founder Ted Young
In this episode, hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback sit down with Ted Young, co-founder of OpenTelemetry, to unpack the real story behind OTel — from its Google origins to today’s push toward zero-touch observability. They explore how OpenTelemetry emerged from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, why the “three pillars” model may be holding teams back, and what the infamous logs vs. eve
The Future of Dashboards: Git Sync, SQL Expressions, and Dynamic Layouts
Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Grafana creator, Torkel Ödegaard, and Grafana Labs' Distinguished Engineer, Ryan McKinley, to unpack Grafana 12’s biggest shifts and experiments. Topics include the new dashboard API and Git sync workflows for dashboards as code, dynamic/constraint-based layouts and conditional panels, SQL expressions for joining query results, and the new assistant s
From Pitch to Product: How Grafana's Hackathons Turn Weird Ideas into Real Features
Hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback welcome Grafana engineers Sven Großmann, Alexa Vargas Ortega, and Lukasz Gut for a deep dive into Grafana’s internal hackathons. They discuss ideation, team formation, tooling (including AI-assisted coding), and the path from hackathon prototype to product feature — plus the occasional bird- and board-game tangent.
Building Grafana Mimir’s Next-Gen Architecture with WarpStream Co-Founder, Ryan Worl
In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Marco Pracucci (Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Labs), Cyril Tovena (Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Labs, and Ryan Worl (Co-founder, WarpStream) to unpack the next-generation architecture for Grafana Mimir. They discuss why decoupling the read and write paths matters, how Kafka-style partition gu
Inside Prometheus 3.0: UTF-8, Native Histograms, and OpenTelemetry Interoperability
In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Julius Volz, co-creator of Prometheus and founder of PromLabs, and Richi "RichiH" Hartmann, Prometheus maintainer and Senior Developer Programs Director at Grafana Labs, to unpack Prometheus 3.0. They trace Prometheus back to its beginnings at SoundCloud, where Julius and his colleagues were trying to recre
Confessions of a serial tinkerer: Homelabs gone wild, secret raspberry pi stashes, and more
Recorded live at GrafanaCon Seattle, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie kick off Season 3 of Grafana’s Big Tent by welcoming Ivana Huckova (Staff Software Engineer, Grafana Labs), Andrew McCalip (Head of Research and Development, Varda Space Industries), and Brad Fitzpatrick (Chief Engineer, Tailscale). They swap first-tinkering stories and laugh through IoT wins and fails (dog happiness monit
Making 3D Printing Observable with Prusa Research
In the season two finale, hosts Tom Wilkie and Mat Ryer are joined by Richard "RichiH" Hartmann, Director of Community at Grafana Labs, and Pavel Strobl of Prusa Research to explore the intersection of 3D printing and observability. Prusa Research not only produces 3D printers that both Tom and Richi use to create everything from wind tunnels to miniature Grots, but the company also uses
The Past, Present, and Future of OpenTelemetry
Two members of the OpenTelemetry governing board, Daniel Gomez Blanco and Juraci Paixão Kröhling, join Mat and Matt to dive deep into the evolution of OTel from its early days (including the story of how OTel got its name) to its current state and future roadmap.
Kubernetes, Kepler, and Carbon Footprints: The Latest Tools and Strategies to Optimize Observability
Hosted by Tom Wilkie, this week's episode features Thomas Dullien, former Co-Founder and CEO of Optimyze; Bryan Boreham, Grafana Labs' distinguished engineer; and Senior Software Engineer at Grafana Labs and member of the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG Niki Manoledaki. Together, they delve into the complex world of cloud resource management and sustainability and explore the intric
Inside Grafana 11 with Founder Torkel Ödegaard
Join hosts Tom Wilkie and Mat Ryer along with Torkel Ödegaard, the creator of Grafana, and Mitch Seaman, Senior Product Director for Grafana, as they dive into the making of Grafana 11 and explore how the observability platform is evolving to meet the needs of both novice and expert users. From how hackathon projects are transformed into major features like Explore Metrics and Logs, to th
How eBPF Makes Observability Awesome
Hosts Tom Wilkie and Matt Toback sit down with guests Liz Rice from Isovalent and Mario Macías from Grafana Labs to explore how eBPF is revolutionizing observability, networking, and security in modern infrastructure. They cover what eBPF is (hint: it's no longer just about packet filtering!), the performance advantages of eBPF-based instrumentation compared to traditional methods, what's
Monitoring Kubernetes: Why traditional techniques aren't enough
In this episode of Grafana's Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie dive into the world of monitoring Kubernetes with guests Vasil Kaftandzhiev from Grafana Labs and Dio Tsoumas who leads the DevOps team at the consumer research company GWI. They explore why traditional monitoring techniques aren't enough for Kubernetes environments and discuss the evolving landscape of observability in
Adapting to the Metrics Cardinality Crisis
Join host Mat Ryer as he explores the world of Adaptive Metrics with Grafana Labs engineers Patrick Oyarzun and Mauro Stettler, alongside guest Oren Lion from TeleTracking. What started as a hackathon project has evolved into a game-changing feature that helps organizations manage their metrics more efficiently and cost-effectively. They discuss the challenge of metric cardinality explosi
Observability to Controllability: Lessons in DDoS Mitigation with Cloudflare
In this episode of Grafana's Big Tent, host Matt Toback explores the world of DDoS protection and observability with guests Alex Forster, Engineering Manager at CloudFlare, and Dee Kitchen, VP of Engineering at Grafana Labs. They discuss the challenges of detecting and mitigating DDoS attacks, the importance of automation in maintaining high availability, and the intricate balance between
The (No) Blame Game: A Sustainable Approach to Incident Management
In this episode, hosts Tom Wilkie and Mat Ryer are teaming up with Grafana Labs’ Devin Cheevers and Prezi’s Alex Koehler to tackle the world of on-call responsibilities and incident management. Alex digs into Prezi's tech stack and provides a real-world look at observability practices and the lessons learned from managing a complex microservices architecture. Tune in to hear best practice
Cache Rules Everything Around Me
To kick off season two of Grafana's Big Tent podcast, our host Mat Ryer is back and he's bringing along some heavy hitters! Get ready for a deep dive into the world of caching with Memcached maintainer Alan Kasindorf (aka dormando), along with caching aficionados Danny Kopping and Ed Welch. They’ll discuss CPU-level to application-level caching and share strategies that supercharge perfor
Shift left observability, SLOs, logs — all the highlights from season 1
From the saddest log line in the multiverse to how metrics, logs, and traces are like a mother sauce, our intrepid hosts, Mat Ryer, Matt Toback, and Tom Wilkie, have been joined by distinguished guests to tackle a wide-range of discussions (not to mention a few conversational detours). For a special bonus episode to cap off the first season, Mat, Matt, and Tom got together to share their
Live from GrafanaFest: Grafana Labs founders AMA
Note: This episode contains a couple of curse words. If you have sensitive ears nearby, maybe save it for later.In this special episode, Grafana Labs' founders Raj Dutt, Anthony Woods, and Torkel Ödegaard answered a wide range of questions about the past, present, and future of the company — and how the people behind the products have always been the driving force behind its success. Reco
How remote-first companies put people first
Darren Murph, Head of Remote at GitLab and author of Living the Remote Dream, joins host Matt Toback to discuss all the advantages of adopting a remote work culture and, in turn, creating a more positive, results-only environment. "There shouldn’t be a focus on availability and visibility," says Darren. "The idea is that we focus on the results. We care a lot less about how you get there,
Inside the Grafana Labs hackathons
Three times a year, Grafanistas can take a week away from their day jobs and invest their creative energy into a company-wide hackathon. In this episode, winners from the recent Grafana Labs hackathons share what motivated their teams to deliver successful projects. (It's not just the prize money—though that helps.) You'll also learn more about the judging process and which projects lande
Observability in the wild: strategies that work
Lego Group principal engineer Nayana Shetty swaps observability survival stories (to drill or not to drill?) with hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback. The trio also reveals new and different observability strategies that have been successful and effective in their organizations. Plus: Nayana shares how she built her successful observability career brick by brick.
All things logs
What's the saddest log line in the multiverse? How do you store logs efficiently? Grafana Labs Software Engineer and Grafana Loki tech lead Ed Welch covers everything you need to know about logs and shares some of his tricks for logging at scale with Grafana Loki. Plus: Learn about the logfmt chants you didn't know existed in the Go community!
Grafana Mimir: Maintainers tell all
Grafana Mimir maintainers have taken over the mic! Marco Pracucci and Cyril Tovena —both software engineers at Grafana Labs — will give you the origin story behind Grafana Mimir, the most scalable, most performant open source time series database in the world. Plus: learn what new features will be coming to Mimir soon and find out the other Norse name the team considered for the project.
Why SLOs are MVPs in observability
Discover why service level objectives are buzzworthy and changing how we do business. Special guests include Parca software engineer Matthias Loibl, who co-created the open source SLO software Pyrra with Nadine Vehling, and Grafana Labs principal software engineer Bjorn "Beorn" Rabenstein, who we are trying to clone for the good of everyone's observability strategies. References discussed
Continuous profiling with Frederic Branczyk
At KubeCon Europe 2019, Polar Signals Founder and CEO Frederic Branczyk predicted that continuous profiling was the future of observability. Fast forward three years, and he's not wrong. In this episode, we'll discuss how Polar Signals' open source tool Parca is leading the conversation around continuous profiling, how it reduces overhead costs thanks to eBPF, how Parca has grown its pass
What even is observability?
So … what is observability? There's usually talk about metrics, logs, and traces, but it's more than just data and it's not simply configuring any one technology or tool. In our premiere episode, hosts Mat Ryer, Tom Wilkie, and Matt Toback dig into key components that help define a successful observability strategy, such as the USE and RED methods, SLO-driven alerting, cost-effective moni
Welcome to Grafana's Big Tent!
Just as Grafana brings together different technologies onto one platform, "Grafana's Big Tent" is our opportunity to shine a spotlight on the incredible people, innovative products, and surprising projects that are shaping the observability world today. Grafana Labs' Mat Ryer, Matt Toback, and Tom Wilkie host these lively episodes filled with sharp insight, candid conversations, exciting
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