Grafana & Friends Brno #1 - The Inaugural Meetup!

We’re excited to invite you to the very first Grafana & Friends meetup in Brno! 🚀

Brno has a great tech community, and it’s about time we brought Grafana & Friends here. Whether you’re deep into observability, just getting started with Grafana, or simply curious about open source monitoring - this is your meetup.

A massive thank you to our friends at OpenSSL for generously hosting us at their Brno office for this inaugural event! 🫶

🗓️ March 19, 2026, 18:00 - 21:00
📍 OpenSSL office, Kotlářská 989/51a, Brno

Agenda
18:00 - 18:30 - Welcome, snacks, drinks & networking
18:30 - 18:40 - Meetup introduction & a few words from our host
18:40 - 19:15 — Talk 1: “How We Use Grafana at OpenSSL” — Dmitri Misharov (🇬🇧 in English)
19:15 - 19:25 — Short break
19:25 - 20:00 — Talk 2: “Observability at Scale at Seznam.cz” — Martin Chodur (🇨🇿 in Czech)
20:00 - 21:00 - Beers & Networking 🍻

🎙️ Speakers

1️⃣ Dmitri Misharov — OpenSSL (🇬🇧 in English)
How We Use Grafana at OpenSSL: From Performance Regressions to Infrastructure Monitoring

Dmitri will share how the OpenSSL team leverages Grafana across multiple areas of their work — catching performance regressions in the OpenSSL library, tracking GitHub issues KPIs, monitoring OpenSSL library downloads, and keeping an eye on their infrastructure. A great look behind the scenes of one of the most critical open source projects in the world.

2️⃣ Martin Chodur — Seznam.cz (🇨🇿 in Czech)
Our Observability Setup at Scale

Martin will walk us through how Seznam.cz — one of the largest Czech tech companies — runs their observability stack at serious scale, with a setup tightly integrated with GitOps. If you’ve ever wondered what it takes to run monitoring infrastructure at this level, this is the talk for you.

💡 What is Grafana & Friends?
Grafana & Friends is a worldwide community of meetups bringing together people who are passionate about observability, open source, and building great developer tooling. With 78 groups across 33 countries and over 34,000 members, we’re one of the largest observability communities out there. From Zurich to Kolkata, London to San Francisco, Stockholm to Pune — and now Brno!

Each meetup is a mix of technical talks, real-world stories, and plenty of time to grab a drink and connect with fellow engineers. Some events feature deep-dive presentations, others are more casual — but they all share the same spirit: learn something new, meet great people, and have fun.

🍕 What to expect

• Two talks from speakers working on interesting projects in the observability and infrastructure space
• Snacks and drinks to kick things off
• Plenty of time for Q&A and open discussion after the talks
• Cold beers and networking to close out the evening
• Stickers!

Our meetups are open to everyone — seasoned SREs, platform engineers, developers, students, or anyone curious about how modern monitoring and observability work. No prior Grafana experience needed. Just bring yourself and your curiosity!

We’re looking forward to meeting the Brno tech community. See you there! 🎉