This talk was presented at Grafana&Friends Stockholm. RSVP here: https://www.meetup.com/grafana-friends-stockholm/events/316301304/

Time for another Grafana & Friends Meetup after the summer break ☀️ 🌴, hosted by Magello 🎉

📕 Agenda
17:00 – 17:25: Drop-in, food/drink-grabbing and mingle
17:25 – 17:30: Introductions
17:30 – 18:00: Measuring what matters and setting the right expectations, Alex Ewerlöf
18:00 – 18:20: Mingle
18:20 – 18:50: Not Just Code: My First OpenTelemetry: Contribution & Hands-On to Open Source, Imma Valls
18:50 – 20:00: Mingle

1️⃣ Measuring what matters and setting the right expectations, Alex Ewerlöf
Service Levels (SLI/SLO) are even more relevant in the age of AI-generated blackboxes. In this talk, Alex talks about:

1. A foolproof methodology to get to meaningful metrics that tie to business objectives and are worth being on-call for
2. Exploring why the AI era makes Service Levels more relevant than ever, but there’s a catch.

Alex is an author and open source developer with 27 years experience and MSc in Systems Engineering from KTH. He has the last 8 years as SRE (senior and staff) helping large and small organizations measure what matters and set reasonable expectations while avoiding broken ownership. He has also spent the last few years building an AI powered (BYOK) app that replaces his role and if there’s time he may show a demo.

2️⃣ Not Just Code: My First OpenTelemetry: Contribution & Hands-On to Open Source, Imma Valls
Starting in open source can feel intimidating, but it doesn’t have to be. In this session, I will share my journey into OpenTelemetry and the CNCF ecosystem, explore both code and non-code contribution paths, and demonstrate how to create and submit a pull request in a real open source project.
This session will highlight concrete next steps: LFX Mentorship, Outreachy, and Google Summer of Code, programs that offer mentorship and visibility to help you make that first contribution with support. Whether you’re a student or working professional, you’ll leave with a clear first step to take today.**

Imma Valls is a Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs and an OpenTelemetry maintainer for the Spanish localization docs.

📍Location
Magello office: Västgötagatan 2, 118 27 Stockholm | https://maps.app.goo.gl/FPhEqLjttBHEneEt8
Take the stairs to the left after entering the building. If anyone is late, dial “Patrik Magello Group” on the door phone.

Food
There will be vegan/vegetarian food and beverages at the event; if you have any allergies or other food preferences, please let us know at least 48 hours before the event!

Photo and video
We may take photos and record videos during the event. If you prefer not to be captured on camera, please let the photographer know when you arrive.
If you feel sick, stay at home.

We are looking forward to seeing you 🎉

Social

• https://lnkd.in/p/e9p3MPA4

Guest at Don’t Forget The Pizza | The DevRel & Events Podcast

Imma Valls Bernaus has reviewed hundreds of KubeCon submissions, run developer communities across Europe, and organized events for over a decade.

In this episode she pulls back the curtain on what Developer Relations actually is — and it’s not just traveling and speaking at conferences.

🍕 In this episode:

• Why community building is a “long-run game” (her Stardew Valley analogy)

• What a KubeCon Track Chair actually does — picking 50 talks from 250 submissions

• The truth about conference talk rejection (spoiler: it’s a numbers game)

• Her step-by-step advice for first-time speakers

• How she manages DevRel chaos with Todoist — her simple to-do list system to tame the chaos

• Cultural lessons from organizing events in Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Japan

🎙️ Don’t Forget the Pizza is the podcast for Developer Advocates, DevRel Managers, Technical Evangelists, and Community professionals who run events as the unwritten part of their job.

🔗 Resources mentioned: Todoist — https://todoist.com

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 — Intro — Welcome Imma Valls Bernaus

00:45 — The Stardew Valley analogy for reviving communities

02:56 — What people underestimate about Developer Advocacy

08:16 — Inside KubeCon as Observability Track Chair: 50 talks from 250 submissions

12:22 — Advice for first-time speakers: start small & play the numbers game

15:50 — How to survive DevRel chaos with Todoist + co-hosting the Grafana Community Call

23:39 — What works in Barcelona won’t work in Japan: cultural lessons from events

29:34 — Lightning Round: languages, stickers & pineapple on pizza?

Social

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/devrel-developeradvocate-communitymanagement-ugcPost-7500662583880859649-Z6qu

This talk was presented at Grafana&Friends Kathmandu.

Meet our speaker! 🎤

We’re excited to welcome Imma Valls Bernaus, Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs.

She will be presenting “Not Just Code: My First OpenTelemetry Contribution and Your Hands-On Guide to Open Source,” the story of her own first contribution, and a practical guide to making yours.

If you’ve ever looked at an open source project and wondered where to even begin, this one is for you.

📅 Sunday, Aug 2
⏰ 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM (NPT)
📍 Online: Google Meet

Social

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/grafana-opentelemetry-opensource-share-7487919920211451905-CqdX/
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/imma-valls_grafana-opentelemetry-opensource-activity-7488481005889052672-MLhC

First time hosting the Grafana OpenTelemetry Community Calls, with a preparation checklist available here.

Recording

RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/grafana-friends-virtual-meetup-group/events/315676803

We’re back with the new Grafana ❤️‍🔥OpenTelemetry Community Call!

In this episode of the Grafana OTel Community Call, we’re exploring OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI). OpenTelemetry eBPF Instrumentation (OBI) offers a powerful way to instrument applications at the system kernel level, capturing essential “RED metrics” — request rate, error rate, and duration — and network flows without requiring code changes, rebuilds, or redeployments.

We will cover the project’s architecture, discuss its origins as Grafana Beyla, and look ahead to the roadmap for language and runtime coverage.

Guests:

• Mario Macías
• Nikola Grcevski

Hosts:

• Imma Valls

This event will be livestreamed on YouTube and published on the same link after the fact: https://www.youtube.com/live/VEFn_ljZhCw?si=UU1x7yA46C_kZuRL

Join the conversation, bring your questions, and learn how this project is evolving with contributions from across the community.

Social:

• https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7483045252992331776/

RSVP: https://grafana.com/go/webinar/mastering-code-based-instrumentation-with-opentelemetry-and-grafana/

A practical guide to code-based OpenTelemetry instrumentation with Grafana

Building on our popular “Intro to OpenTelemetry” webinar, we are excited to present you with this webinar focused on advanced OpenTelemetry instrumentation techniques and the innovative use cases it unlocks.

In this live demo and Q&A, Grafana Labs experts will show how to add custom spans, metrics, and attributes that capture the application and business context zero-code instrumentation cannot always see. You’ll learn how to apply OpenTelemetry semantic conventions, send OTLP telemetry to Grafana Cloud, and use Grafana Cloud Application Observability and Grafana dashboards to turn that data into actionable insights.

You’ll also see how richer OpenTelemetry context can support AI-assisted investigations in Grafana, helping teams correlate signals, identify likely root causes, and understand business impact.

What you’ll learn

1. Learn when to use zero-code instrumentation and when code-based instrumentation can provide deeper context.
2. See how application telemetry can reveal performance patterns and quantify business impact.
3. Visualize and analyze OpenTelemetry data with Grafana and Grafana Cloud Application Observability.
4. Learn how custom telemetry and semantic context can improve AI-assisted investigations with Grafana Assistant.

Socials

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/harrabab-singh_grafana-opentelemetry-observability-share-7487545837905158144-YeCn/?

Recording https://womeninapis.substack.com/p/facilitating-a-workshop-that-gets

What do you do when everything goes wrong?

Claire and Imma have run hundreds of workshops between them.

They’ve seen the same thing happen, over and over.

A room full of smart people. A few hours together. And at the end, everyone’s had a good chat, but the real work still sits waiting for another day.

Done right, though, a workshop can condense four months of work into four hours.

In this episode of GET /Ready, Claire Barrett, Imma Valls and Olivia Osborne dig into how.

Together, we explore:

• Why identifying what the group actually needs comes first.
• The real difference between facilitating, presenting and training, and how mixing them up can throw a room off track.
• How to design a session around your audience, rather than a generic agenda.

Whether you’re planning your first workshop or your 15th, this conversation is full of practical advice you can put into practice straight away.

El podcast está disponible aquí.

Social

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/podcats-devops-devopsdays-share-7483886948546195456-S705/

RSVP: https://luma.com/xauvgrx6

AI Socratic Barcelona is a monthly gathering for AI practitioners, researchers, builders, educators, and design thinkers shaping the Barcelona AI ecosystem.

​As a chapter of AI Socratic, we run Socratic dialogues on the latest developments in AI: new models and architectures, breakthrough research, agentic ecosystems, socio-technical alignment, philosophy, and geopolitics.

​We believe the most profound insights happen when diverse perspectives share the same room. Whether your background is in engineering, research, product, ethics, art, or education—if you care about AI and its trajectory, you belong here.

​This is our inaugural event, and we want to thank Runroom for kindly hosting us.

​Attendance & Participation

​To keep discussions highly interactive and meaningful, space is limited and every application is reviewed. We are not looking for specific job titles, corporate hierarchy, or elite backgrounds. We look for curiosity, diverse points of view, depth of thought, and willingness to contribute to a shared conversation.

​The event runs in English 🇬🇧, unless everyone in the room comfortably speaks Spanish/Catalan.

​Agenda

• ​18:30 – 19:00 | Welcome & Networking
• ​19:00 – 20:00 | Socratic Dialogues. This month, we’ll discuss some topics from the June 2026 blog post.
• ​20:00 – 20:30 | Demos, Lightning Talks & Presentations
• ​20:30 – 21:00 | Mingling

​How the Conversations Work

​We open with informal networking so you can connect with people in the room before the main session begins.

​The core dialogue is structured around the latest AI Socratic monthly themes published on our blog, leaving plenty of space for the threads, questions, and technical deep-dives that matter most to the attendees present.

​Everyone is encouraged to contribute. The sessions are moderated to ensure a flowing, balanced discussion where every voice has space to be heard.

​We close the evening with short, high-fidelity technical demos and presentations. Submit yours here.

​Code of Conduct

​AI Socratic Barcelona is built on the premise that better ideas emerge when we build on diverse perspectives. The Code of Conduct exists to ensure that vision is real, safe, and actionable for everyone.

​Who this is for:

​Everyone: attendees, speakers, hosts, facilitators, and guests. No exceptions.

​What we cultivate:

• ​Be curious, not combative. Challenge ideas, hypotheses, and architectures—never the person presenting them. The Socratic method thrives on collective good faith.
• ​Make room for others. If you naturally lean toward speaking, practice active listening. If you notice a perspective being sidelined, help invite them into the conversation.
• ​Respect identities and expertise. Avoid assumptions about what someone knows (or doesn’t know) based on their background, role, accent, or appearance.
• ​Constructive engagement. Offer feedback and insights thoughtfully, ensuring discussions remain collaborative and respectful of everyone’s ongoing work.

​What has no place here:

• ​Harassment or exclusionary behavior of any kind, including comments related to gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, ethnicity, religion, or age. This applies to dialogues, presentations, networking, and digital channels.
• ​Disruptive behavior, including sexualized imagery or language, deliberate intimidation, persistent interruption, or taking photos/recordings without explicit consent.

​Accountability:

​If you experience or witness anything that compromises the safety or inclusivity of the space, please speak directly with an organizer or reach out via aisocraticbarcelona@gmail.com. All conversations will be handled with strict confidentiality.

​Anyone asked to stop a specific behavior is expected to do so immediately. Persistent violations will result in removal from the event and future editions.

​The Short Version:

​Treat everyone in the room with the empathy, respect, and openness you would want if you were the only person holding your specific viewpoint or background.

Social

• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/imma-valls_aisocratic-barcelonatech-aiengineering-activity-7468557317383426049-nm8G
• https://www.linkedin.com/posts/romulus-roman_aibarcelona-aicommunity-artificialintelligence-share-7478683275285315584-mQ5o/

This talk was presented at Open South Code 2026.

Grafana is powerful on its own. However, its true potential lies in its vibrant community of plugin developers. In this talk, we’ll explore how community plugins extend Grafana’s core functionality, enabling you to connect to a broader range of data sources and visualize your data in new ways, or start creating your own.

As a practical example, we’ll introduce the Kafka Data Source plugin and demonstrate how it lets you query and visualize Kafka topic data directly in your dashboards, eliminating the need for intermediate storage or external services. We’ll also demo how to build your first plugin.

Demo repository: https://github.com/thopewell/grafana-kafka-datasource-demo

Social

• https://es.linkedin.com/posts/imma-valls_opensouthcode2026-opensouthcode2026-opensource-activity-7475106629181534210-ELsQ

Recording https://womeninapis.substack.com/p/what-do-you-do-when-everything-goes

What do you do when everything goes wrong?

The night before her talk at apidays India, Deepti had a nightmare.

Her slides disappeared.

Her demo failed.

Everything she’d spent weeks preparing stopped working.

She woke up relieved.

It wasn’t real.

The next morning, she walked onto the stage.

And then it happened.

For real.

In this episode of GET /Ready, Deepti shares what happened next, and the lessons she’s learned from more than 15 years of public speaking, engineering leadership, and helping teams adopt AI.

Together, we explore:

• Why preparation isn’t the same as perfection.
• How to recover when things don’t go to plan.
• The small habits that make speaking feel less daunting.
• Why your experience is often more valuable than you think.

Whether you’re preparing your first conference talk or your fiftieth, this conversation is full of practical advice you can put into practice straight away.