Name: Grafana Meetup: Drilldown & Kafka
Start: 2026-04-14T18:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-04-14T20:00:00-05:00
Location: Silicon Labs

***What Can We Do With a (Kafka) Queue?***
Apache Kafka now natively supports queue-like semantics with KIP-932—Queues for Kafka—addressing the need for point-to-point messaging. This talk will explore the new cooperative consumption model, introducing message-level acknowledgments in the ShareConsumer API. We'll demonstrate how developers can manage message state, including support for long-running, non-deterministic tasks. We’ll cover observability, reviewing key metrics and configuration options. Discover how "Queues the Kafka way" can augment your messaging architecture. How to view consumer metrics via Grafana and MCP x Observability x AI.

***Drilldown and Knowledge Graph:***
We'll also chat about the Knowledge Graph (formerly Asserts) and Drilldown app integrations. There will be a general overview of what the Knowledge Graph is and how linking to the Drilldown apps in the RCA workbench empowers users.

We'll also have time for some food, snacks, drinks, and socialization. See you there!

Matthew Fine

Grafana & Friends Austin

Grafana

Grafana Labs

Technology

Open Source

New Technology

Cloud Computing

Big Data

Data Analytics

Data Visualization

Predictive Analytics

Data Science

Web Analytics

Kubernetes

Observability

**Sandon Jacobs** is a Sr. Developer Advocate at Confluent, based in Raleigh, NC. Sandon has two decades of experience designing and building applications, primarily on the JVM. His data streaming journey began while building data pipelines for real-time bidding on mobile advertising exchanges—and Apache Kafka was the platform to meet that need. Later experiences in television media and the energy sector led his teams to Kafka Streams and Kafka Connect, integrating data from various in-house and vendor sources to build canonical data models.

Outside of work, Sandon is actively involved in his Indigenous tribal community. He serves on the NC American Indian Heritage Commission, and also as a powwow singer and emcee at many celebrations around North America. Follow Sandon on Twitter @SandonJacobs or Instagram @_sandonjacobs, where he posts about his powwow travels, family, golf, and more.

**Viktor Gamov** is a Principal Developer Advocate at Confluent, founded by the original creators of Apache Kafka®. With a rich background in implementing and advocating for distributed systems and cloud-native architectures, Viktor excels in open-source technologies. He is passionate about assisting architects, developers, and operators in crafting systems that are not only low in latency and scalable but also highly available.

As a Java Champion and an esteemed speaker, Viktor is known for his insightful presentations at top industry events like JavaOne, Devoxx, Kafka Summit, and QCon. His expertise spans distributed systems, real-time data streaming, JVM, and DevOps.

Viktor has co-authored "Enterprise Web Development" from O'Reilly and "Apache Kafka® in Action" from Manning.

Follow Viktor on X - @gamussa to stay updated with Viktor's latest thoughts on technology, his gym and food adventures, and insights into open-source and developer advocacy.




**Brendan O’Handley** is a software engineer for Grafana for the last 3 years. He has worked on many Grafana data sources, most notably the Prometheus data source building the Metrics Explorer. He likes hiking, birding and astronomy so if you have any recommendations, he would love to here them!



Sandon Jacobs, Viktor Gamov, Brandon O'Handley