Grafana & Friends Berlin — 2026 Kickoff with Kong × Kafka × Grafana

Join us for the first Berlin meetup of the year as we bring together Kong × Kafka × Grafana for an evening focused on real-time data, streaming, and observability 🚀

This meetup is all about learning from practitioners, sharing experiences, and kicking off 2026 with the local data & platform community.
As always, expect high-quality technical talks, great conversations, and good vibes — plus pizza 🍕 and cold drinks to keep things flowing.

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🔐 Important
For security reasons, please provide your Full name and surname during registration.
Our volunteers will verify your registration at the entrance — this is mandatory to access the venue.
Your information will be used only for this purpose.

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🗓️ Event Details
📅 Date: 29.01.26

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🕐 Agenda

18:00 — Welcome & Snacks
Doors open! Grab a slice, meet fellow community members, and get settled.
18:30 — Opening Remarks
A warm welcome from the Berlin community and event partners.
18:45 — Tech Talks Begin

📚 Talk Details

### Talk 01: Keeping data private in real-time pipelines By Olena Kutsenko

Abstract
We all love real-time data — clicks, payments, rides, messages — but most of it comes with a catch: it often includes personal information we’re not allowed to leak, such as names, emails, locations, or subtle clues that can identify someone.
So how do we keep streaming data useful and safe at the same time?
In this talk, we’ll explore practical approaches to protecting privacy in streaming systems using Apache Kafka, Apache Flink, and Apache Iceberg. We’ll cover:

• Simple techniques like masking and tokenizing PII
• Why “anonymous” data often isn’t really anonymous (the re-identification problem)
• Privacy-preserving approaches such as bucketing, k-anonymity, and adding noise
• How to balance privacy and data utility (because over-hiding can make data useless)

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### Talk 02: Blackbox Monitoring is Hard! (And Why That’s the Best Part) By Goutham Veeramachaneni

I’ve been experimenting with Beyla and eBPF-based monitoring since its inception. While it’s an incredible tool for getting started with zero-code instrumentation, making it work reliably at scale presents a unique set of hurdles.

In this session, we’ll introduce Beyla’s architecture and show how it can kickstart your observability journey.But the real story lies in what happens next. Navigating the scaling challenges has been an absolute blast, and we’ve tackled each bottleneck unfazed—sometimes by leaning into the tech, and other times by resorting to white box native instrumentation to gain the granular insights we need.What you’ll learn:

• • The "How": A technical deep dive into how Beyla works under the hood.
• • The "Real-World": The specific challenges we faced when moving beyond the initial phase.
• • The "Trade-offs": A transparent look at the limitations of different approaches, from pure blackbox eBPF to native instrumentation.
• • The "Product": Insight into the intricacies of building a new product in a rapidly evolving ecosystem.

Whether you are an observability veteran or just starting with eBPF, you’ll walk away with a better understanding of your monitoring stack and the confidence to handle the limitations of the tools you use.

### Talk 03: Securing and governing both external and internal traffic By Sven Walther

Modern enterprises must secure and govern APIs, event-driven systems, and internal services—without fragmenting control across multiple platforms. This talk shows how a unified management plane brings consistency, visibility, and security across the entire application landscape using Kong Konnect.
The session will cover three key areas:

• External connectivity & event exposure
  Securely connect partners and customers to your event-driven systems without exposing internal infrastructure directly.
• Internal service governance with Service Mesh
  Apply security, traffic control, and observability across your internal network using a service mesh.
• Fine-grained Kafka governance
  Enforce policies and security down to the individual message level for internal event streams.

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### 🤝🏻 21:00 — Networking & Q&A

Connect with fellow developers, data engineers, platform teams, and observability enthusiasts.
Share ideas, experiences, and maybe even exchange a LinkedIn connection or two.
21:30 — Event Wrap-Up

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📷 Photo Notice

By attending this event, you consent to being photographed.
These photos may be used for future community and event promotions.
Don’t forget to smile 😄

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We’re excited to kick off 2026 with the Berlin community and can’t wait to see you there!

If you have any questions or are interested in speaking at future meetups, feel free to reach out.