Grafana brings ObservabilityCON to Sydney amid AI boom

Grafana Labs has scheduled a one-day ObservabilityCON on the Road event in Sydney, bringing its regional user and partner conference series to Australia.

The event is positioned as a forum for engineering leaders and practitioners across Asia-Pacific to discuss operational monitoring. The agenda centres on three themes: controlling telemetry spending, reducing tool sprawl, and managing the reliability of AI-driven systems.

Observability has become a mainstream concern for IT teams as systems spread across cloud services, container platforms, and distributed architectures. Many organisations collect large volumes of logs, metrics, and traces, but face growing complexity in managing and acting on that data.

Grafana Labs pointed to its 2025 Observability Survey, which ranks "complexity and operational overhead" as the most commonly reported obstacle. It said 39% of engineering teams named it their biggest challenge. The survey also found organisations use an average of eight observability tools.

Cost is also a central issue for monitoring and reliability programmes. The survey found 74% of organisations see cost as the main factor in purchasing decisions, signalling tighter scrutiny of telemetry budgets.

Grafana Labs has positioned its commercial offering, Grafana Cloud, as an "open observability cloud" based on open source software and open standards. It says this reduces reliance on multiple vendors and gives organisations more flexibility in deploying monitoring and analysis across environments.

Asia-Pacific is one of the company's faster-growing regions, which Grafana Labs attributes to continued cloud adoption and digital transformation. It also cited broader investment in Australia and the region, including local support, community activity, and partner development.

Anthony Woods, Co-Founder, Grafana Labs, said:

"Some of the most complex, large-scale systems in the world are being built and operated here in Australia and across APAC. As software becomes more distributed and AI-driven, open observability is no longer optional - it's foundational. Bringing ObservabilityCON on the Road to Sydney is about investing in our local community, learning from customers at scale, and sharing how open, AI-powered observability helps teams move faster with confidence."

Customers and partners

Grafana Labs said it has more than 7,000 customers worldwide, including Anthropic, Salesforce, and Microsoft.

In Asia-Pacific, it highlighted a growing partner ecosystem. It named DNX Solutions as APAC Partner of the Year, linking the award to work supporting Grafana Cloud adoption in the region.

The company also cited use cases in financial services, telecommunications, technology, government, and critical infrastructure. It named Blinkit and Atlassian as organisations using Grafana products, saying customers use the tools to improve reliability, reduce downtime, and gain real-time insight into service health and performance.

AI-focused organisations are another target segment. Grafana Labs said AI-native companies face fast-changing model behaviour and usage patterns that can drive volatile infrastructure demand. It named Harrison.ai and Dubber as regional examples using Grafana Cloud in production.

Brendon Hay, CTO, Dubber, said: "As an AI-driven platform operating at global scale, we need deep, real-time visibility into highly distributed systems. Grafana Cloud gives our teams a unified view across metrics, logs, and traces, helping us quickly understand system behaviour, resolve issues faster, and confidently support AI workloads."

Graham Bucknell, Platforms Engineering Manager, Harrison.ai, said: "Running AI in production, especially in clinical settings, means there's no margin for blind spots. Grafana Cloud gives us end-to-end visibility across our systems, so our teams can understand what's happening, act quickly, and scale safely. That transparency lets us move fast without compromising reliability or trust."

Event agenda

Grafana Labs said the Sydney program will include a keynote from Woods, along with presentations from Grafana engineers and senior product leaders. Customer sessions are expected to include Dubber and Tally Group.

One track focuses on the company's AI features, under the banner "Actually Useful AI". The agenda includes Grafana Assistant, which Grafana Labs says can query telemetry and generate dashboards. It also plans to cover Assistant Investigations, described as agentic AI for multi-step incident analysis that coordinates metrics, logs, traces, and profiles during incidents.

Another theme is cost management, framed as "Reimagined SaaS Economics". Talks are set to cover Grafana's Adaptive Telemetry suite, which the company says helps manage telemetry volume and spend. Sessions will also cover Bring Your Own Cloud, a deployment approach that places customer workloads in their own cloud environment.

A third focus area is operational simplification under the theme "Complexity, Simplified". Grafana Labs said it will present Grafana Cloud Knowledge Graph, which it says maps relationships across services, infrastructure, and telemetry. Sessions will also cover Instrumentation Hub and Database Observability, positioned as out-of-the-box products aimed at faster setup and clearer analysis.

Grafana Labs said the Sydney conference will focus on practical case studies and technical sessions, highlighting how teams in the region are managing observability complexity and cost as distributed systems and AI workloads expand.