Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam brought together about 13,500 attendees this year, the largest turnout yet. The size of the event showed just how much the cloud-native space has grown, and how central observability, platform engineering, and cost control have become. For VictoriaMetrics, this year’s event was a mix of talks, booth conversations, and a lot of direct feedback from users.

GrafanaCON 2026 kicked off in Barcelona, which is a fitting city to reveal the latest updates in Grafana 13. In 2013, Grafana Labs Co-founder Torkel Ödegaard made the first commit for what would become Grafana while he was on vacation in the Catalan city. "I was traveling here for the Christmas holiday and I got a cold and spent most of the day in bed coding and working on Grafana," said Torkel during the opening keynote of GrafanaCON, our biggest community event of the year.

Last month, the VictoriaMetrics team gave a talk on retroactive sampling at KubeCon Europe 2026. By writing this blog post, as a transcript of the session, we want to explain how retroactive sampling reduces outbound traffic, CPU, and memory usage in the data collection pipeline significantly compared to tail sampling in OpenTelemetry.

HIMSS 2026 made something clear: healthcare is no longer discussing digital transformation as a future-state goal. It is now dealing with the operational reality of having already become deeply digital. Conversations around HIMSS 2026 consistently pointed back to the same pressure points: AI adoption, cyber resilience, interoperability, and infrastructure modernization. Together, they reflect a healthcare environment managing more systems, more dependencies, and more risk than ever before.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026 brought thousands of cloud-native practitioners to Amsterdam for four days of talks, demos, and hallway conversations about where Kubernetes is heading. HAProxy Technologies came as a Diamond Sponsor, and by the time the exhibition floor closed on Thursday, it was clear that the market had reached the same conclusion we had. HAProxy is the standard — and this year, more people than ever were ready to say so out loud.

Honeycomb was excited to attend KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe, where one theme stood out across sessions: as AI reshapes how software is built and run, teams are being pushed to rethink how they understand their systems. Without strong observability and feedback loops, AI can accelerate confusion, misalignment, and operational risk.

The reason why I like writing recap articles is because AIs don’t have enough context to write them for us. You have to be there, in person, listen to sessions, interact in the hallways with the community, and absorb as much new knowledge as possible. That’s what I did last week in Amsterdam at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe ‘26. Well, at least I tried to. Let me break down what I consider the most interesting topics were last week.