GrafanaCON Local Meetup: San Francisco

A taste of GrafanaCON is coming to you!
Join your local observability community for an evening of open source inspiration, real-world stories, and meaningful connections - all in a laid-back, meetup-style setting.

This event will feature a recap of the GrafanaCON keynote, combined with fresh voices from your own community.
Grafana team members will walk through Grafana 13 and the most impactful improvements across the platform. Learn about how Grafana is becoming easier and safer to operate as production infrastructure, with updates that improve configuration management, recovery, and long-term maintainability. The session showcases significant advances in core user workflows, including more flexible and powerful dashboards, with improved performance.

Agenda:
6:00 - 6:30: Arrivals and pizza
6:30 - 7:00: GrafanaCON recap presentation, AI Observability Updates from Senior Principal Field Engineer Éamon Ryan
7:00 - 7:15: Q&A
7:15 - 7:30: Community lightning talks by John Hill, Grafana Champion & UIDX Test Frameworks @ CrowdStrike
7:30 - 8:00: Discussion and more pizza!

Whether you’re building dashboards, scaling Kubernetes, contributing to open source, or just getting started - this meetup is for you!

Abstracts
k6 Synthetic Monitoring: Only the Hard Part

Setting up a synthetic monitor is easy. Making one your team actually trusts is the hard part. False positives quietly destroy on-call rotations: a flaky network blip, a slow cold start, or a brittle UI assertion fires a page, the engineer checks, everything's fine, and over time the alerts get muted. Then a real incident slips through.
This 20-minute talk walks through how Grafana k6 can be used as a continuous synthetic monitor that's worth waking up for. We'll cover four concrete techniques — SLO thresholds defined in code, aggregating signal across runs instead of alerting on single failures, UI contract tests that survive layout changes, and combining API and UI checks into a single script so a UI failure tells you exactly which team to escalate to. We'll close with a live demo against a Dockerised app where a bug-toggle pushes the SLO into the red, two visually different UIs both pass through the same contract tests, and a Grafana dashboard shows API and UI failures correlated in real time.
You'll leave with: a working open-source demo repo, a mental model for designing synthetics around signal-to-noise, and a copy-pasteable pattern for combined API + UI tests.

🎟 Free to attend
🍕 Pizza + drinks provided
🤝 Built for connection
💡 Real talks from real practitioners

Note that by registering for this event you consent to related event & product communications from Grafana Labs and agree to our code of conduct.