CNCF Releases 2026 Observability Summit North America Schedule as Cloud Native Observability Adoption Expands

Observability Summit North America returns May 21–22 in Minneapolis, convening practitioners, contributors, and engineers to advance open observability standards and practices

Published on Feb. 22, 2026

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The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced the schedule for Observability Summit North America 2026, taking place in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 21–22. The two-day program features more than 45 sessions exploring high-impact telemetry, automated synthetic monitoring and the practical implementation of Observability as Code (OaC). The event brings together developers, operators, site reliability engineers, platform teams and open source maintainers focused on building and operating cloud native observability systems.

Why it matters

As most organizations begin to run AI workloads, the hard question is whether they can trust and measure what's running in production. Observability is how the community closes that gap, and this summit is where that work happens. The event highlights practical approaches to metrics, logs and traces as organizations scale cloud native systems and adopt open observability standards.

The details

The Observability Summit North America 2026 program features tracks addressing topics including how AI and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) are shaping observability, approaches to scaling complex systems, community-led standards development and practical ways to embed observability into DevOps workflows. Highlights include sessions on AI and MCP in Observability, CNCF Observability Projects, Community-Driven Development in Observability, End-User Case Studies, Integrating Observability into DevOps Practices, and Scalability Challenges and Solutions.

  • The Observability Summit North America 2026 will take place on May 21–22 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
  • Early bird registration is open at $349 through March 24.
  • Applications for the Dan Kohn scholarship program are being accepted through April 6 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.
  • Companies interested in sponsoring the event should submit a request to [email protected] by April 1.

The players

Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation builds sustainable ecosystems for cloud native software.

Jonathan Bryce

The executive director of CNCF.

Megha Goyal

A speaker at the event.

Kyle Hounslow

A speaker at the event.

Raghu Vamshi Challa

A speaker at the event.

Justin Rech

A speaker at the event.

Diana Todea

A speaker at the event.

Antonio Jimenez Martinez

A speaker at the event.

Adnan Rahić

A speaker at the event.

Carol Valencia

A speaker at the event.

Josh Lee

A speaker at the event.

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What they’re saying

“AI is raising the stakes for reliability. As most organizations begin to run AI workloads, the hard question is whether they can trust and measure what's running in production. Observability is how the community closes that gap, and this summit is where that work happens.”

— Jonathan Bryce, Executive Director, CNCF (prnewswire.com)

What’s next

Registration is open now; early bird registration is $349 through March 24. Discounted registration is available for academics. Applications for scholarships are being accepted through April 6 at 11:59 p.m. PDT.

The takeaway

The Observability Summit North America 2026 highlights the growing importance of observability as organizations scale cloud native systems and adopt open observability standards. The event brings together a diverse community of practitioners, contributors, and engineers to advance the state of the art in cloud native observability.