Scaling OpenTelemetry & Autonomous Kubernetes Ops at KubeCon NA 2026

Kubernetes has firmly cemented itself as the bedrock for AI workloads; around 66% of organizations hosting generative AI models run inference on Kubernetes, and that number is trending higher. But as services, autonomous agents, and AI applications multiply, so do the telemetry and dependencies behind them, and troubleshooting takes longer. Many teams are now struggling with "Agent Debt," the growing sprawl of monitoring agents, telemetry pipelines, and tools across their clusters.

We’re heading to KubeCon North America 2026 to show how platform engineers, SREs, and AI developers can use OpenTelemetry-first observability and autonomous operations to resolve issues faster and manage telemetry costs–and put an end to Agent Debt. 

Meet up with us at KubeCon NA 2026, and bring your toughest Kubernetes troubleshooting questions to Booth #159. Our team is ready for them.

Here’s what you’ll see from New Relic at KubeCon NA 2026:

• OpenTelemetry at scale: Deploy OpenTelemetry across Kubernetes clusters with the OpenTelemetry Kube Stack chart. See how Operator auto-instrumentation, together with refined configurations like lowDataMode, reduces OpenTelemetry ingest.
• Autonomous operations: Get a demo of New Relic’s Autopilot Kubernetes (K8s) Agent, which uses more than 90 diagnostic detectors to investigate Kubernetes incidents from cluster events, object descriptions, and telemetry with APM traces, logs, and infrastructure signals.
• The Noisy Neighbor Problem: Our lead demo will draw on one of the most pressing challenges for Platform Engineering: the disconnect between application and platform layers.

OpenTelemetry Built In: Zero Lock-In

Built natively on OpenTelemetry, New Relic delivers open standards and vendor-neutral telemetry collection across enterprise Kubernetes clusters. We'll showcase Infrastructure 360 and Database 360, connecting application performance directly to infrastructure changes and database wait states.

Whether you run self-managed Kubernetes, managed cloud services, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS), Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Red Hat OpenShift, or VMware Kubernetes Service (VKS), stop by to discuss practical ways to improve observability.

Autonomous Operations with Ground Truth Context

New Relic brings unified operational context and autonomous investigation directly to Kubernetes workflows:

• New Relic Ground Truth: Supplies high-density operational context directly to SRE workflows and AI tools.
• Autopilot K8s Agent: uses more than 90 specialized detectors—purpose-built for Kubernetes failure modes like OOMKills, probe failures, scheduling and eviction problems, and misconfigured custom resources—to investigate incidents from cluster events, object descriptions, and telemetry with APM traces, logs, and infrastructure signals. That helps teams move from alert to root cause faster.

Featured Lead Demo at Booth #159: “The Noisy Neighbor Problem”

An app team gets paged for a slow service that looks healthy on its own, dragging the platform team into a cross-layer investigation. In this demo, follow the path from APM transaction latency spikes down to node metrics and limit configurations where a single pod without CPU limits is starving its neighbors. Watch how Autopilot automatically confirms the missing limits and recommends the fix—moving from symptom to root cause in just a few clicks.

Check out the New Relic sessions at KubeCon

Observability Day (Monday, November 9 | Salt Palace, Level 2, Room 250 D-F)

• What’s the Dollar Cost of Slow? Answering Business Questions with OTel
  • Learn how custom OpenTelemetry trace, metric, and log patterns connect latency directly to business cost. 
  • When: 1:30 to 1:55PM
  • Presented by Hannah Ramadan
• An Ode to Metrics: Is OpenTelemetry Moving Away from Prometheus?
  • See how we compare Prometheus and OpenTelemetry metrics, from collection models to histograms and cross-signal interoperability.
  • When: 2:40 to 3:05 PM 
  • Co-presented by Reese Lee 

OpenTofu Day (Monday, November 9 | Salt Palace, Level 1, Grand Ballroom H)

• Inside the Engine: Tapping into OpenTofu’s Internal Logging and Tracing for Security Auditing
  • Explore how to use OpenTofu’s internal logs and traces to build a security audit trail without modifying the engine.
  • When: 2:05 to 2:30 PM
  • Presented by Zameer Fouzan 

BackstageCon (Monday, November 9 | Salt Palace, Level 2, Room 255 EF)

• The Guardrail Paradox: Why Secure Software Templates Actually Speed Up Your Day 1 Code
  • This lightning talk shows how security built into Backstage software templates helps engineers ship production-ready services faster.
  • When: 5:00 to 5:10 PM
  • Presented by Zameer Fouzan

KubeCon Main Conference (Wednesday, November 11 | Hyatt Regency, Level 4, Regency BD)

• OTel Blueprints: Prescriptive Patterns for Enterprise Observability 
  • The session introduces community-driven OTel Blueprints for deploying observability across Kubernetes and multi-cloud infrastructure. 
  • When: 11:00 to 11:30 AM
  • Presented by Dan Gomez Blanco
• Sample Smarter, Not Harder (Or Not At All!)
  • The session explores sampling strategies across SDKs and Collectors to reduce overhead and telemetry costs.
  • When: 11:50 AM to 12:20 PM 
  • Co-presented by Reese Lee

In-Booth Presentation (Wednesday, November 11 | New Relic Booth #159)

• Kubernetes Monitoring with the OpenTelemetry Kube Stack
  • See the OpenTelemetry Kube Stack Helm chart installed on a live Kubernetes cluster with auto-injection of metrics, logs, and traces.
  • When: 1:45 - 2:00 PM  
  • Presented by Reese Lee and Dan Gomez Blanco

Head to our event page for full session details. 

Expanded Enterprise Logging Capabilities

Beyond metrics and traces, New Relic’s enterprise logging solutions include Federated Logs to resolve in-region data residency mandates, AI Log Summarization for rapid incident diagnostics, and Scheduled Search and Reporting (now GA) to automate routine queries.

We’re at Booth #159

You name it, our experts are here to discuss it: Kubernetes operations, OpenTelemetry adoption, reliability engineering, AI observability, database performance, and telemetry cost optimization. 

Get a detailed explanation of how we can tailor our solutions to neatly fit your use case: 

• Autopilot K8s Agent
• Infrastructure 360 
• Database 360 
• New Relic Ground Truth 
• Federated Logs

and more.

Ask us anything, from initial setup to the hardest troubleshooting cases. Grab some time with our experts for a 1-on-1 on-site meeting here.

Join Us at KubeNight Out

Join New Relic, PagerDuty, Pulumi, Sysdig, and YugabyteDB for KubeNight Out on Wednesday, November 11 (5:30 - 8:30 PM). Connect with cloud-native practitioners and platform engineers over food, drinks, and games. Space is limited, so register here.

Whether you’re tuning OpenTelemetry for a large fleet, cutting telemetry costs, or tracking down the pod that’s slowing everything else down, come find us at Booth #159.