What happened

Last week, eighty Prometheus users and developers from around the world came together for two days in Berlin for the first-ever conference about the Prometheus monitoring system: PromCon 2016. The goal of this conference was to exchange knowledge, best practices, and experience gained using Prometheus. We also wanted to grow the community and help people build professional connections around service monitoring. Here are some impressions from the first morning:

Just landed at #promcon. This is gonna be an exciting conference. pic.twitter.com/2hsFaS32IK — Till Backhaus (@backhaus) August 25, 2016

The foodening is over, so let's have some talks. #promcon2016 pic.twitter.com/GUGq8eLEdQ — Richard Hartmann (@TwitchiH) August 26, 2016

At PromCon, speakers from a variety of large and small companies talked about how they were using Prometheus or are building solutions around it. For example, DigitalOcean spoke about their challenges of using Prometheus at massive scale, while ShuttleCloud explained how it was a great fit for monitoring their small startup. Our furthest-traveled speaker came all the way from Tokyo to present how LINE is monitoring their systems using Prometheus. Weaveworks explained how they built a scalable multi-tenant version of Prometheus.

Several Prometheus core developers also talked about the the design decisions behind the monitoring system, presented upcoming features, or shared best practices. On a lighter note, two lightning talks explained the correct plural of Prometheus, as well as an implementation of Conway's Game of Life in the Prometheus query language.

Prometheus Design and Philosophy - Why It Is the Way It Is by @juliusvolz #promcon2016 pic.twitter.com/XrPhXasb9k — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 25, 2016

To see the entire program, have a look at the schedule.

In the breaks between talks, there was a lot of fun (and food) to be had:

After wrapping up talks on the first evening, we enjoyed a warm summer night with food and drinks on Gendarmenmarkt, one of Berlin's nicest plazas. This gave people a chance to mingle even more and exchange thoughts and ideas around Prometheus.

Had a great evening event at #promcon2016... thanks everyone :) pic.twitter.com/GoQtm9Q76d — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 25, 2016

Overall, we were blown away by the quality of talks, the wide diversity of use cases, as well as the friendly community coming together in this way and forming new connections!

Talk recordings

At PromCon 2016, we made it a priority to record all talks professionally. Especially for a small conference like this, recording and sharing talks was important, as it dramatically increases the reach of the talks and helps Prometheus users and developers around the world to participate and learn.

Today, we are pleased to announce that all talk recordings are now ready and publicly available. You can enjoy them in this Youtube playlist!

Reception

The feedback we got from speakers and attendees at PromCon 2016 was incredibly encouraging and positive. A lot of people loved the friendly community feeling of the conference, but also learned a lot from the focused talks and interesting conversations. Here is what some attendees had to say:

I had to admit as well - one of the best tech conf I have ever attended. @PrometheusIO @Percona #promcon2016 pic.twitter.com/5HgKt0r9cu — Roman Vynar (@rvynar) August 26, 2016

Sad that #PromCon2016 is over. Best tech conference I've been to yet! — Nick Cabatoff (@NickCabatoff) August 26, 2016

@PrometheusIO I can't remember the last time I learned so much(or laughed so much) at a tech conference Thanks to all! So glad I attended! — cliff-ops (@cliff_ops) August 26, 2016

For two days it was tangible that we already have something amazing and that many more, even greater things are still to come. #PromCon2016 — Hynek Schlawack (@hynek) August 26, 2016

Overall, we were very happy with how PromCon turned out - no event is perfect, but for a small community conference organized in free time, it exceeded most people's expectations.

Thanks

PromCon 2016 would not have been possible without the help of its sponsors, speakers, attendees, and organizers. Thanks so much to all of you! Our Diamond and Platinum sponsors deserve a special mention at this point, since they did the most to support us and made all the food, drinks, video recordings, and swag possible:

Diamond

Platinum

We would also like to thank Google for hosting the conference at their office in Berlin!

Outlook

If PromCon 2016 went so well, when will the next one happen?

Promcon was nice. Looking forward to next time. Bye Berlin. #promcon2016 pic.twitter.com/XInN9OR3pL — Robert Jacob (@xperimental) August 27, 2016

The answer is that we don't know for sure yet. This first PromCon was organized entirely in people's free time, with most of it handled by one person. This will surely have to change, especially as we also expect a next Prometheus conference to be much larger (even this year, the limited tickets sold out within seconds). In the next months, we will discuss within the community what we want PromCon to be, who should run it, and where it should take place. Perhaps there is even space for multiple Prometheus conferences around the world. We will report back when we know more. Stay tuned!