Grafana's Big Tent

In this episode of Grafana's Big Tent, hosts Mat Ryer (Senior Director of AI, Grafana Labs) and Tom Wilkie (CTO, Grafana Labs) sit down with Eric Burns, Field Executive Architect at Anthropic, to talk about building trust between tech and business execs, why Anthropic bet early on running across every major cloud, and what it was like watching large language models go from "interesting" to "obviously the future" in real time.
The conversation ranges from the earliest goosebumps moments of natural-language UI generation, to Claude writing better MCP servers than humans, to the very real question of whether engineers should still be reading code at all. Along the way: coding on planes, instrumenting a Zigbee mesh with Claude Code, why "recovering engineers" are getting their dopamine hits back, and whether a human reviewing an AI's code is adding value or just getting in the way.

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, host Mat Ryer is joined by Donia Chaiehloudj (Isovalent), Charles Korn (Grafana Labs), and Bryan Boreham (Grafana Labs) to break down how to make Go applications observable from day one. The discussion covers logs, slog, tracing with context, errors, pprof, continuous profiling, and eBPF.

In this episode of Grafana’s Big Tent, host Tom Wilkie is joined by Spiros Xanthos (Founder & CEO, Resolve AI), Manoj Acharya (VP of Engineering at Grafana Labs), and Cyril Tovena (Principal Software Engineer, Grafana Assistant team) to explore the rapidly evolving world of agentic AI in production systems. They dig into automated root cause analysis, knowledge graphs, and how AI agents are beginning to operate alongside — and sometimes ahead of — human engineers. The conversation tackles trust, pricing models, data privacy, and whether we’re approaching a future where incidents resolve themselves. Plus: Tesla autopilot analogies, AI-written performance reviews, and what’s next beyond observability.

In this episode, hosts Mat Ryer and Matt Toback sit down with Ted Young, co-founder of OpenTelemetry, to unpack the real story behind OTel — from its Google origins to today’s push toward zero-touch observability. They explore how OpenTelemetry emerged from the merger of OpenTracing and OpenCensus, why the “three pillars” model may be holding teams back, and what the infamous logs vs. events debate reveals about how the industry thinks about data. Ted breaks down the technical and philosophical shifts happening in observability, including context propagation, structured telemetry, semantic conventions, and why backwards compatibility matters more than most people realize.

Mat Ryer and Tom Wilkie sit down with Grafana creator, Torkel Ödegaard, and Grafana Labs' Distinguished Engineer, Ryan McKinley, to unpack Grafana 12’s biggest shifts and experiments. Topics include the new dashboard API and Git sync workflows for dashboards as code, dynamic/constraint-based layouts and conditional panels, SQL expressions for joining query results, and the new assistant sidebar. They also reflect on Grafana’s history,  how ease of use and looking “cool” helped adoption, and practical guidance for teams operating at scale.