Name: LA DevOps x Grafana & Friends LA present: To MCP or Not MCP
Start: 2025-12-18T18:00:00-08:00
End: 2025-12-18T21:00:00-08:00
Location: O'Briens Irish Pub

**[Join the December LA DevOps x Grafana & Friends LA Meetup](https://www.meetup.com/ladevops/)**

[Dondy Aponte](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dondya/) and Dmitri Pappa *from [Grafana Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs) will be discussing Grafana MCP*

**6:00 - 6:30 Attendees arrive. Networking/Mingle**
**6:30 - 6:45 LA DevOps Welcome, Attendee Introductions**
**6:45 - 7:30** **To MCP or Not To MCP** by Ken Cavanagh
**7:30 - 8:00** Dondy Aponte & Dmitri Pappa present **Grafana MCP**
**8:00 - 9:00 Networking/Mingle**

**To MCP or Not MCP**
The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is redefining how AI connects to tools and data. It’s gaining traction fast, but some say it’s over engineered. This talk breaks down what MCP is, why it matters, and when it’s worth building on.

**About Ken:**
Ken Cavanagh is an industrial psychologist, AI developer and co-founder of Agency/42, an innovation studio building AI products, MCPs, and applied AI strategies for clients.

**Grafana MCP**
The Grafana team shares how AI has been adopted by some of the world’s most popular dashboards and how MCP helps enable agentic workflows in their Observability stack.

**About Dmitri:**
Dmitri is a Grafana Solutions Engineer who helps customers improve enterprise visibility. He draws on extensive experience in problem-solving and automation at fortune 500 companies.

**About Dondy:**
[Dondy Aponte](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dondya/) is a Senior Solutions Engineer at [Grafana Labs](https://www.linkedin.com/company/grafana-labs), specializing in observability, cloud-native technologies, and digital transformation. With a strong background in IT strategy and infrastructure, he helps organizations optimize their observability and analytics capabilities to drive efficiency and innovation.

**About O'Brien's Pub on Wilshire:**
The covered patio at [Obrien's Pub](https://www.obriensla.com/) has been a great place to host LA DevOps meetups during our post covid revival.
Regarding parking, there are meters on Wilshire and the side streets that expire at 6.

**Present at an Upcoming LA DevOps Meetup**
If you would like to present at an upcoming LA DevOps meetup please send a message in meetup to the organizers with a proposed title and a sentence or two about the talk.

Jordan Schwartz

Grafana Community

Grafana & Friends Los Angeles

Grafana

Grafana Labs

Technology

Open Source

Cloud Computing

Security Metrics

Data Visualization

Load Testing and Performance

Log Management

DevOps

Cloud Integration

Metrics

Application Performance Monitoring

Big Data

Software QA and Testing

DevOps Automation

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

LA DevOps x Grafana & Friends LA present: To MCP or Not MCP

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence Applications

O'Briens Irish Pub

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LA DevOps x Grafana & Friends LA present: To MCP or Not MCP

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