Cloud Native PDX

Cloud Native PDX September: Observability Night!

For September, we're taking advantage of a speaker in town for DevOpsDaysPDX, and making it an all-observability night, with FluentBit and OpenTelemetry.

Date: Wednesday, September 16, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Location: SteepleJack Brewing, Fireside Room, 2400 NE Broadway, Portland

A big thank you to SUSE for sponsoring catering at SteepleJack, as well as Eric's travel.

First Presentation: No C, No Opaque AI: Watch Your First Fluent Bit Contribution Happen Live

Speaker: Eric D. Schabell, SUSE

Contributing to a CNCF graduated project feels out of reach until someone shows you exactly how it happens. In this session, that someone is on stage doing it in real time — spotting a gap between what the Fluent Bit codebase actually does and what the docs say, opening a branch on a live fork, running the project's prose linter, writing a properly signed commit, and pushing a pull request that closes a real tracked issue. Every step, no shortcuts, no slides pretending to be a terminal.
You will leave knowing the two-repo mental model that makes Fluent Bit doc contributions work, the git habits that signal credibility to maintainers, and the AI guardrails that keep your name attached to work you actually stand behind. Your first PR does not require deep C knowledge. It requires knowing where to look, how to show your work, and when to keep your hands on the wheel.

Second Presentation: Devs, Transform (Your Data) and Roll Out!: Learning and Leveraging OTTL

Speaker: Reese Lee, New Relic

The OpenTelemetry Collector is OTel’s power tool for ingesting and processing your app and infrastructure data, but there’s even more you can do with your data before it reaches your backend! Learn how to start leveraging OTTL, or OpenTelemetry Transformation Language, to manage your data volume and quality. We’ll explore the syntax basics and its underlying architecture within the Collector, where its strength really comes into play, when to use it (or not!), and more.