Reliability and observability have their own small circuit of conferences, separate from the big cloud and Kubernetes weeks. It has three kinds of event: the non-profit SREcon conferences, a growing set of free or cheap community days, and the user conferences of observability vendors. Each is useful for a different reason, and this guide goes through the 2027 ones on our list.
Events marked (expected) had not announced 2027 dates when we checked; their dates are the previous edition moved forward 52 weeks. The SRE and observability topic pages always show the current list.
SREcon: the reference events
USENIX, the non-profit computing systems association, runs SREcon. The programme comes from an open call reviewed by working SREs, vendors are kept to the sponsor area, and the tone is engineering-first.
SREcon27 Americas, Seattle, 12 to 14 April 2027, at the Sheraton Grand Seattle. The 2027 call asks for talks on the business context SREs work in, including how generative AI changes the job, alongside a systems strand on performance, databases, observability and OpenTelemetry, networking and security. Proposals are due on 19 November 2026 through the call for participation, and first-time presenters can ask for support.
SREcon27 EMEA, Dublin, 5 to 7 October 2027, at The Convention Centre Dublin. Expect three days of parallel tracks, a discussion track under Chatham House rules, workshops such as incident simulations and lightning talks. USENIX bills it in US dollars; the listing gives the 2026 fees of USD 950 early bird to USD 1,300 late, with student and hardship rates. Its call has opened in spring in recent years.
Both publish free video recordings a few weeks after the event, so the back catalogue is worth an evening even if you cannot travel.
Free and low-cost community days
SREday is a series of one-day community conferences from the team behind Conf42. They are small, practitioner-heavy and often free. The 2027 dates on our list:
- SREday Warsaw, 24 February, free, the same week as ContainerDays Warsaw.
- SREday London, 18 March, at Everyman Canary Wharf, with a call open until 18 February 2027.
- SREday Katowice, 9 June, the series’ first Katowice date, free.
- (expected) SREday Cologne in June, SREday London in September and SREday Amsterdam in November.
Conf42 runs the same idea online, one topic per day, free to watch: Conf42 SRE on 4 March, Conf42 Observability on 9 September and Conf42 Chaos Engineering on 16 December. Calls stay open until a few weeks before each date, which makes them a good first place to give a talk.
In Japan, two volunteer-run conferences cover the same ground in Japanese: SRE Kaigi, a one-day event in Tokyo on 20 February, and SRE NEXT, two days at TOC Ariake on 9 and 10 July. SRE Kaigi streams its main hall sessions, and SRE NEXT plans to live-stream its sessions.
Observability projects and their communities
PromCon EU (expected, October, likely Munich) is the Prometheus community’s own conference. It is single-track and small, so maintainers and heavy users end up in the same room. The listing gives 2026 tickets of EUR 130 early bird to EUR 215 late, with academic tickets from EUR 45.
GrafanaCON, New York, 27 to 29 April 2027, is Grafana Labs’ community conference for Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, Mimir, Tempo, Pyroscope, k6 and OpenTelemetry. The first day is hands-on labs. The call is open until 11 January 2027, and first-time speakers get a free pass.
OSMC, the Open Source Monitoring Conference in Nuremberg (expected, mid-November), has run since 2006 and keeps the same shape: a day of paid workshops, then two conference days on two tracks covering Prometheus, Icinga, Checkmk, Grafana, OpenTelemetry and on-call practice.
The KubeCon weeks also carry observability content: KubeCon Europe has an Observability Day among its co-located events on 15 March.
Vendor user conferences
Vendor conferences are product-centred, and you should go knowing that. They are still where many SRE and operations teams meet, they often include training and certification, and their customer talks can be frank about scale.
- Dynatrace Perform, Las Vegas, 16 to 18 February. A training day, then two days of talks and on-site certification exams. Passes rise by date, from $1,195 until 31 October 2026 to $1,795 from January.
- Datadog DASH, New York, 15 and 16 June. Workshops are part of the ticket and certification exams can be taken on site at no extra cost.
- Splunk .conf, Chicago, 4 to 7 October. A large share of the programme is for security operations; the observability and IT operations sessions are the part for SREs.
If you run one of these products, the training and the roadmap sessions may justify the trip. If you do not, the free digital passes and on-demand sessions some vendors offer are enough to see what they do.
Wider conferences with a strong reliability track
- QCon London, 13 to 15 April, has an Observability and SRE stream and a day on resilience, risk and governance. Speakers are invited rather than chosen from a call, and it is expensive: the early-bird conference pass is GBP 2,390 before VAT until 10 November 2026.
- GOPS in China holds three stops a year in Shenzhen, Beijing and Shanghai, with SRE and observability case studies from banks, telecom operators and large enterprises, in Mandarin: Shenzhen in April, Beijing in July and Shanghai in October (all expected).
- Chaos Carnival (expected, January) is an online day on chaos engineering and resilience testing, hosted by Harness, so expect product talks next to the independent ones.
Putting a year together
For most SRE teams a good year combines three things:
- One SREcon, chosen by region. It sets the bar for what the field is talking about, and the discussion and workshop tracks are worth being in the room for.
- One or two community days for networking and a first or second talk. SREday and Conf42 calls are open for long stretches, and the community days cost little or nothing to attend.
- The recordings of the rest, watched as a team. SREcon and many vendor conferences publish sessions after the event.
The CFP guide covers how to get a reliability talk accepted, and the 2027 calendar guide shows where these events sit in the year.