GrafanaCON Local meetup: Amsterdam at HCS Company

A taste of GrafanaCON is coming to you, Amsterdam!

📕 Agenda
17:30 Open doors.
18:00 Food & Drinks
18:30 Talks start

1️⃣ GrafanaCON recap presentation
Imma Valls, Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs
We will present the key points and most relevant announcements from the GrafanaCON 2026 keynote.
2️⃣ Peripheral observability: Why 72px micro-dashboards beat wall displays in incident response
Gerard de Jong, Aspiring Software Super-villain at ABN AMRO Bank
Gerard de Jong used to believe the same lie everyone else does: More screen = more observability.
But then he hacked a Stream Deck to show 72x72 pixel Grafana dashboard panels, always visible in his peripheral vision, and it completely changed how he handles incidents. Suddenly: No more hunting for the right browser tab. No more joining calls are already behind. No more surprises when an alert fires.
While wall displays are great for high-level status, they fail during the "fog of war" of an active incident. Peripheral vision is tuned for motion and patterns, not dense charts. That’s why car dashboards, cockpits, and game HUDs all put tiny signals just below the line of sight.
In this lightning talk, Gerard demonstrates how and why small displays make this possible (be it on a Stream Deck, a Raspberry Pi, or everything in between), the layouts that actually work, and why micro-dashboards let you often see anomalies before alerts fire while everyone else is still opening Grafana.
This is not a toy – it’s a practical hack for real on-call life.
Learn:

• How 72x72 pixels can outperform a wall display.
• How to design Grafana for glance-first awareness.
• Secure Grafana API integration via encrypted tokens.
• How to escape tab blindness during incidents.
• Ready-to-use patterns for Stream Deck + Grafana.

3️⃣ Living on the Edge: Where IT and OT Meet
Benoit Schipper, Field CTO at HCS Company
The industrial world is no longer an island. As the gap between Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) continues to shrink, the "Edge" has become the critical frontier for innovation, data processing, and real-time decision-making.
In this session, we explore the practical realities of industrial digitalization through the lens of a Siemens IOT2050 setup. We will dive into how this hardware acts as a gateway, translating the rugged, protocol-heavy language of the factory floor into the scalable, data-driven environment of modern IT.
In this presentation, I will touch upon the following:

• The core architecture is required to bridge PLC environments with cloud or local IT infrastructures.
• Why we chose the Siemens IOT2050 as our preferred "Edge" device for balancing industrial durability with open-source flexibility.
• Mastering the constraints: Key lessons learned from deploying a "living" setup that manages data at the source while navigating the challenges of limited RAM on the edge.

Whether you are working in IT or OT as an engineer or architect, this 20-minute deep dive provides insights for navigating the intersection of hardware, connectivity, and open-source tools, and the ultimate reason for liberating data on the industrial edge.

🏢 Location
HCS Company: Anthony Fokkerweg 61, Amsterdam | https://maps.app.goo.gl/LPMZKBzB7MutGrZb6.
The HCS Company office is easily accessible by both car and public transport. You can park your car on their premises; ample parking is beyond the barrier. If you come by public transport, you can get off at the Henk Sneevlietweg metro station; from there, it is a 10-minute walk.

Many thanks to our good friends at HCS Company, who have kindly offered to host us at their Amsterdam office 🫶

We are looking forward to seeing you 🎉!