Grafana&Friends 🤝 Apache Kafka®

We're thrilled to invite you to our next meetup, a joint event with the Zurich Apache Kafka® community 💥

Many thanks to our great friends at Sunrise, who have kindly offered to host us at their office 🫶

🗓️ March 9, 2026
📍Sunrise: Ambassador House, Thurgauerstrasse 101B, 8152 Glattpark (Opfikon) | https://maps.app.goo.gl/2pLV5duBYj3vwdDt5
St. Gallen meeting room

📕 Agenda
18:00 - 18:30: Open doors
18:30 - 18:40: Meetup introduction & some words from the host
18:40 - 19:20: Talk 1
19:20 - 19:45: Talk 2
20:00 - 21:00: Pizzas & Networking
21:00 - 21:10: Event and venue closure

1️⃣ "Supercharging Grafana with Community Plugins" by Luis Colman (Solutions Engineer at Grafana Labs), Imma Valls (Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs).
Grafana is powerful on its own, but its true potential lies in its vibrant community of plugin developers. In this talk, we'll dive into how community plugins extend Grafana's core functionality, enabling you to connect to a broader range of data sources and visualize your data in new ways. We'll introduce the Kafka Data Source plugin as a practical example, demonstrating how it enables you to query and visualize Kafka topic data directly in your dashboards, without requiring intermediate storage or external services.

2️⃣ "From Stream to Table: Building Kafka-to-Iceberg Pipelines", by Will Martin is the EMEA Evangelist at Dremio.
While Kafka excels at streaming data, the real challenge lies in making that data analytically useful without sacrificing consistency or performance. This talk explores why Apache Iceberg has emerged as the ideal streaming destination, offering ACID transactions, schema evolution, and time travel capabilities that traditional data lakes can't match. Learn about some foundational tools that enable streaming pipelines and why they all converge on this next-generation table format built for flexibility and scalability.

We are looking forward to seeing you 🎉!