What happened

Two weeks ago, Prometheus users and developers from all over the world came together in Munich for PromCon 2017, the second conference around the Prometheus monitoring system. The purpose of this event was to exchange knowledge and best practices and build professional connections around monitoring with Prometheus. Google's Munich office offered us a much larger space this year, which allowed us to grow from 80 to 220 attendees while still selling out!

Take a look at the recap video to get an impression of the event:

At PromCon, speakers from a variety of organizations talked about how they are using Prometheus and building solutions around it. For example, Cloudflare and DigitalOcean both explained how they use Prometheus to monitor their large-scale networks and datacenters:

Cloudflare is a large user of Prometheus. Lorenz Bauer explains how they handle alerts and dashboards across 115 data centers #PromCon2017 pic.twitter.com/IXs09Lp6z6 — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 18, 2017

Speakers from Grafana and InfluxData brought us up to date with new features and Prometheus integrations:

You like Prometheus but have a need for long-term storage? @pauldix presents how @InfluxDB integrates with Prometheus at #PromCon2017 pic.twitter.com/hpsO95mPVL — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 18, 2017

Several Prometheus core developers also spoke about best practices and new features and developments in Prometheus:

Our own @juliusvolz gives a lecture on best practices and pitfalls when starting with @PrometheusIO #PromCon2017 pic.twitter.com/gTNrxeaxK7 — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 17, 2017

Prometheus 2.0 will be immensely more performant! 😎 @fabxc explains how he rewrote the storage from the ground up for that #PromCon2017 pic.twitter.com/wzDZWMrvGB — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 18, 2017

A core requirement of alertmanager is high availability. @fredbrancz is now explaining the design and implementation #PromCon2017 pic.twitter.com/UKng19PyiO — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 17, 2017

You wonder how to convince your peers to use Prometheus? Then @TwitchiH's talk about the social aspect of change is for you! #PromCon2017 pic.twitter.com/tTu3LwF3u7 — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 17, 2017

In the last full-length talk of #PromCon2017, Brian of @RobustPerceiver describes the new staleness handling in Prometheus 2.0 pic.twitter.com/QFiNco6jhp — PrometheusMonitoring (@PrometheusIO) August 18, 2017

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

In the breaks and after-parties, we had a lot of fun:

...and one lucky participant finally had her childhood dream come true:

Talk recordings

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

Again, we received incredibly positive and encouraging feedback from speakers and attendees this year. Here is what some had to say:

#PromCon2017 was a blast. Lovely people talking about Monitoring, SRE and hacking. That's exactly my kind of thing. See you next time! pic.twitter.com/pKcIiupFHK — Mic 🐧 (@nomaster) August 18, 2017

#PromCon2017 was fantastic and I hope to see everyone next year! Not just amazing talks, also awesome attendees and organizers! Thank you! — Kamila Součková (@AnotherKamila) August 18, 2017

Not even close to the end of the year but I can already say, #PromCon2017 was the best and most fun conference of the year! — Frederic Branczyk (@fredbrancz) August 18, 2017

We had a blast at #PromCon! Thx @juliusvolz, Richard Hartman & the #PromCon team for an amazing conference! Auf Wiedersehen! Til next year! pic.twitter.com/b4DwJdqQcs — Weaveworks (@weaveworks) August 18, 2017

pretty stoked from #PromCon2017 ! it was probably the best conference i've been to yet! Hope work more with the community in the future =) — Lukas (@1uk4sh) August 18, 2017

While there were things going wrong here and there, we think that the event turned out super well overall for a community-organized conference, and we're happy to see that our attendees felt similarly!

Thanks

PromCon 2017 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 Venue 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

Venue

We would also like to thank all our other sponsors!

A special thank you to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for helping us handle financials and the registration system!

Outlook

With PromCon 2017, the Prometheus community organized its second successful Prometheus conference. Since all attendees really appreciated the community character of the event, we definitely aim to keep this special feeling for PromCon in the future. PromCon 2017 was still organized mainly in people's free time, but we started distributing the work load over more people this year. For the next iterations of PromCon, we still need to discuss how to make this community-organized model more sustainable. We don't know yet when, where, and how PromCon 2018 will happen, but we will report back when we do, and we hope to welcome you back!

Stay tuned!