CNCF Releases 2026 Observability Summit North America Schedule as Cloud Native Observability Adoption Expands

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Feb 18, 2026, 15:05 ET

Observability Summit North America returns May 21–22 in Minneapolis, convening practitioners, contributors, and engineers to advance open observability standards and practices

Key Highlights

CNCF announced the schedule for Observability Summit North America 2026, May 21–22 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
The program highlights practical approaches to metrics, logs and traces as organizations scale cloud native systems and adopt open observability standards.
The event brings together developers, operators, site reliability engineers, platform teams and open source maintainers focused on building and operating cloud native observability systems.
Registration is open now; early bird registration is $349 through March 24. Discounted registration is available for academics. Applications for scholarships are being accepted through April 6 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- The Cloud Native Computing Foundation® (CNCF®), which builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software, today announced the schedule for Observability Summit North America 2026, taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 21–22.

The two-day program features more than 45 sessions exploring high-impact telemetry, automated synthetic monitoring and the practical implementation of Observability as Code (OaC). Tracks address topics including how AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are shaping observability, approaches to scaling complex systems, community-led standards development and practical ways to embed observability into DevOps workflows.

"AI is raising the stakes for reliability," said Jonathan Bryce, executive director, CNCF. "As most organizations begin to run AI workloads, the hard question is whether they can trust and measure what's running in production. Observability is how the community closes that gap, and this summit is where that work happens."

Highlights at Observability Summit North America 2026 include:

AI and MCP in Observability

This track explores how AI and MCP are applied in observability workflows. Sessions address root cause analysis, tracing model-driven decisions and incident response automation. View the full track here.

Speaker Highlight:

How Observability-First Development Lets You Ship Agents in Weeks, Not Months-Megha Goyal & Kyle Hounslow, AWS

CNCF Observability Projects

This track focuses on the evolution of CNCF observability standards and tooling. Sessions include deep dives into OpenTelemetry and the OpenTelemetry Transformation Language (OTTL), with practical guidance on optimizing telemetry pipelines. View the full track here.

Speaker Highlight:

Devs, Transform (Your Data) and Roll Out!: Learning and Leveraging OTTL-Reese Lee, New Relic

Community-Driven Development in Observability

This track focuses on community-led development within open source observability projects. Sessions examine standards evolution, contributor workflows and governance models shaping CNCF initiatives. View the full track here.

Speaker Highlight:

GPU-Scanner: Extending CNCF Observability for Multi-GPU AI Workloads-Ritika Gupta, Oracle

End-User Case Studies

This track highlights real-world implementations of open observability tools. Sessions share lessons on scaling OpenTelemetry, reducing costs, debugging cloud failures and building enterprise telemetry backbones. View the full track here.

Speaker Highlight:

Unified End-to-End Observability: How Comcast Generates SpanMetrics at Enterprise Scale-Raghu Vamshi Challa & Justin Rech, Comcast

Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices

This track examines how observability is embedded into DevOps practices. Sessions cover synthetic monitoring for Kubernetes, OaC, telemetry debt management and scaling data planes. View the full track here.

Speaker Highlight:

Panel: Telemetry That Matters-Diana Todea, VictoriaMetrics; Antonio Jimenez Martinez, Cisco ThousandEyes; Adnan Rahić, Bindplane; Carol Valencia, KrolCloud; Josh Lee, Altinity

Scalability Challenges and Solutions

This track examines approaches to maintaining performance across large-scale distributed systems. Sessions cover handling large data sets with Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments and log and trace architectures. View the full track here.

Speaker Highlight:

10 Million Spans Per Second: Lessons From Scaling OpenTelemetry at Reddit-Trevor Riles, Reddit

Observability Summit North America 2026 will run as a CNCF-hosted event co-located with Open Source Summit North America. Early bird registration is open at $349 through March 24. Discounted rates are available for full-time students and faculty.

The Dan Kohn scholarship program provides complimentary registration for community members from underrepresented groups. Applications are open through April 6 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

Strategic partners include Datadog, Chronosphere and the OpenSearch Foundation.

The event is supported by Diamond sponsor Odigos and Platinum sponsors ClickHouse, Dynatrace, Elastic, Grafana Labs and VictoriaMetrics.

Companies interested in sponsoring Observability Summit should submit a request to [email protected] by April 1. To learn more, view the sponsorship prospectus.

Additional Resources

About Cloud Native Computing Foundation
Cloud native computing empowers organizations to build and run scalable applications with an open-source software stack across public, private, and hybrid clouds. The CNCF hosts critical components of global technology infrastructure, including Kubernetes, Prometheus, and Envoy, bringing together top developers, end users, and vendors. Supported by nearly 800 members, including the world's largest technology companies and over 200 innovative startups, CNCF is part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. For more information, visit www.cncf.io.

The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see our trademark usage page. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Media Contact
Kaitlin Thornhill
The Linux Foundation
[email protected]

SOURCE Cloud Native Computing Foundation