What is o11yfest?

o11yfest is a multi-day virtual technology conference focused on empowering DevOps practitioners with solutions that improve observability over systems and processes. It was held online using a online platform on May 9-12 2022, hosted by community leaders and Growgistics LLC in collaboration with leading experts and companies in the continuous delivery and systems reliability ecosystem.

Why is o11yfest around?

The conference is designed to promote awareness in OpenTelemetry and other relevant projects and techniques related to increasing visibility, transparency, and traceability of mission-critical data across software teams. o11yfest is in its third year of operation as a grass-roots event whose aim is to encourage sharing of knowledge and development of the discipline of observability engineering.

What’s Different between 2021 and 2022

In its first year, Observe 20/20 hosted hundreds of practitioners and community members and subsequently transformed into o11yfest 2021. As point-in-time events, this was great, but organizers also feel that it is important to grow this into reoccurring community events.

This year, we’re doubling up on our o11yfest community to reflect this intent, and hope to hold multiple future events throughout 2022 and beyond under the ‘o11yfest’ umbrella.

Why is o11yfest [still] Virtual?

Our organizers feel that during our current COVID restrictions, we are responsible to plan an event which does not over-commit attendees or over-promise sponsors to logistics that would put anyone at risk. This decision is not easy since, at it’s earliest conception in late 2019, the event has always intended to ‘bring people together’ in meaningful ways. Unfortunately for all of us, this is not physically plausible, despite other conferences making decisions around physical presence and logistics.

We are committed to safety and equity for the whole community and a virtual event still seems the best way to make sure of this in 2022.