PromCon 2024

This year marks my debut as conference speaker! During PromCon EU 2024, which took place in Berlin September 11-12, I got two occasions to co-speak!

During the first day of the conference, my colleague Jesús Vázquez and I gave the talk Practical OpenTelemetry with Prometheus 3.0, where we shared with the audience all the work we put in towards making Prometheus 3.0 a 1st class OpenTelemetry (AKA OTel) metrics back-end.

Some of the points from our talk:

  • OTLP receiver endpoint stable

  • Massive OTLP performance improvements

  • Promoting OTel resource attributes to metric labels

  • The experimental info PromQL function - an easy way to include OTel resource attributes in queries

  • Support for delta temporality

Slides

The following day I gave a talk together with my colleage Ganesh Vernekar: The Future of Metadata in Prometheus: Enhancing Storage and Usability. This was an open-ended talk about how the two of us are working on designing support for persisted metadata in Prometheus. The goal of this project is to add capabilities to Prometheus for storing metadata associated with time series, to solve problems such as the following:

  • Persisting the current metric metadata (type, unit, help)

  • High fidelity representation of OTel resource attributes per time series

  • Attaching custom metadata to time series (instead of as labels)

  • Tracking changes to metadata over time

Slides

Speaking at PromCon was a really invigorating experience, and there was a heartwarming amount of feedback from the audience. We took away a lot of inspiration from presenting our work and ideas to a welcoming crowd.

Aside from the talks I took part in, it was a truly amazing conference. A single-track conference, it was practically a continuous stream of professionally relevant/enlightening content. Apart from the talks, just chatting with other Prometheus practitioners/developers in person was both really enjoyable and useful. Definitely coming back, whether I’m giving a talk or not!