Observability in Action: Dashboards, LLMs & Out Run

🗒️ About the event

Join Grafana & Friends Manchester at bet365 for an evening of talks, live demos, and community conversation!
We’ll explore how to build dashboards that work for your whole team, find the performance limits of an LLM service, and bring observability to a classic arcade game. Expect practical examples, ideas to try in your own projects, and the chance to put your driving skills to the test! 🏎️

📅 Thursday 22 October 2026
🕕 17:45–20:00

📍 bet365, Zenith Building, just off Market Street, between Manchester Piccadilly and Victoria stations. The host team will welcome you downstairs, check you in and escort you up to the event.

📋 Agenda
17:45 · Welcome, food, and refreshments 🍕
Meet fellow community members and grab a bite before the talks begin.
18:15 · Talks and live demos 🎙️

🎙️ One dashboard, a thousand contexts
Speaker: Mihaela Maior, Director Engineering, Grafana Labs
How do you build one dashboard that serves your entire team, instead of maintaining ten conflicting copies?
Mihaela will explore filters, multi-property variables, and variables defined at the instance, folder, dashboard, and section levels. Through demos and practical examples, you’ll learn how to use these features to adapt a single dashboard to different contexts.

🎙️ How much traffic can your GPU really handle before an LLM service starts to fall apart?
Speakers: Ben Kaimogul, Senior Infrastructure Engineer at Callcare Ltd, and Ruth Kegicha, Innovation Discovery Manager
What happens when an LLM application reaches its limits? In this live, hands-on session, Ben and Ruth will put a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application running on vLLM and NVIDIA T4 GPUs under increasing load—and watch what happens with Prometheus, Grafana, and k6.
Using tests that behave like real users, they’ll connect user experience with inference metrics to explore latency, throughput, queue depth, token generation, and GPU saturation. You’ll learn how to distinguish a busy system from a saturated one, and leave with a practical approach to capacity testing, plus demo code, k6 scripts, and reusable Grafana dashboards.

🎙️ Taking Out Run from the Arcade into Grafana with OpenTelemetry
Speaker: Simon Prickett, Senior Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs
Observability isn’t just for infrastructure! Simon will demonstrate how he instrumented the classic ’80s arcade driving game Out Run using the OpenTelemetry SDK for C++.
Follow the journey from capturing traces, logs, and screenshots in Tempo and Loki to exploring the results in Grafana dashboards, including the new GraphViz panel for data-driven diagrams.
Aspiring racers can take the wheel during networking, with Grafana helping us crown champions for the highest score, most overtakes, and longest clean driving streak! 🏆

20:00 · Wrap-up 💬

Whether you’re a developer, DevOps or SRE engineer, AI practitioner, or simply curious about Grafana and observability, you’re welcome. Come along to learn, share ideas, and meet the Manchester community!

#Grafana #Observability #OpenTelemetry #Prometheus #k6 #AI #DevOps #SRE