Cloud Native Melbourne x Grafana & Friends: August Meetup
Two Melbourne communities, one room.
Cloud Native Melbourne and Grafana & Friends Melbourne are teaming up for our August meetup. Three talks on building and running telemetry in production — and what happens when you hand the debugging to an AI agent.
The lineup
6:25pm — Beyond the Happy Path: Operating Telemetry Pipelines in Production
Benny Lo — Senior Software Engineer, SEEK
Telemetry pipelines look simple on an architecture diagram: collect, process, export. Operating them in production is where things get interesting. Drawing on experience across organisations of different sizes, Benny shares the practical lessons and trade-offs of running telemetry pipelines — from simple agent-to-backend setups to distributed agents and standalone aggregators. What worked, what didn't, and when the added flexibility of owning more of your telemetry pipeline is actually worth the operational complexity.
About Benny: Benny's interest in technology began early, when his radar-engineer father would let him play on his computer. Since graduating with a Computer Science degree in 2008 he has worked across network engineering, systems engineering, site reliability engineering, platform engineering and technical leadership, in both consulting and in-house roles. His recent work focuses on observability and the platforms behind it — designing and operating telemetry infrastructure, improving reliability, and helping engineering teams better understand and operate their systems.
6:55pm — To Make An SLO, First You Must Invent The Universe: OpenTelemetry Collection From Scratch
Cail Young — Senior SRE, Octopus Deploy
In 2025, a team at Octopus Deploy was tasked with building a multi-region, highly available, autoscaling OpenTelemetry-based telemetry processing platform. They'd never had anything like it before, and didn't have many documented examples to work from. This case study makes public the moving parts required to deliver a brand new telemetry pipeline on OpenTelemetry Collector and Kubernetes, and examines the many trade-offs and misadventures the team went on while building it out.
About Cail: Cail has spent the last couple of decades working at the intersection of people and technology: in the performing arts, in the motion picture industry, and now in software operations. He is fascinated by learning from incidents — large and small — and will gladly trade stories about them. He is a proud member of the Resilience In Software Foundation, a group dedicated to applying Resilience Engineering principles to the business of operating software systems.
7:30pm — We Gave an AI Agent kubectl and It Found the Thing Waking Us Up
Song Jin — Principal Developer, Propel Ventures (ex-Xero Lead DevOps Engineer)
The cluster was throttling CPU, PagerDuty was firing overnight, and the latency SLA was under threat. The team pointed an AI agent with scoped kubectl access at it, and the agent found the root cause in time to fix it — the nights went quiet and the SLA held.
This is the specific story, not the pitch deck version. Song walks through the investigation loop the agent actually ran, the access model that made read-only genuinely read-only, and what they logged so they could reconstruct what it did afterwards. He'll also be honest about the limits: where the agent produced confident nonsense, where it needed a human to reframe the question, and the class of problem he still wouldn't hand it. If you're weighing whether to let an agent near your production cluster, you should leave with a realistic picture of both sides.
About Song: Song is a platform and DevOps engineer based in Melbourne. He spent his most recent years at Xero running Kubernetes platform infrastructure for the Payments team, and has just joined Propel Ventures, an AI consultancy. Outside work he runs a self-hosted multi-agent LLM setup at home, which has given him an unusually detailed view of the failure modes. He's interested in the unglamorous middle ground: agents scoped tightly enough to be safe and still useful. He runs half marathons, mostly to think about problems he can't solve at a keyboard.
Running order
6:00pm — Doors, food and drinks 6:25pm — Benny Lo 6:55pm — Cail Young 7:25pm — Short break 7:30pm — Song Jin 8:00pm — Networking 8:30pm — Close
Where
Mantel, Level 2, 452 Flinders Street, Melbourne VIC 3000. Two minutes from Southern Cross Station and a short walk from Flinders Street. Head to Level 2 and someone will meet you at the lifts from 6:00pm.
Food
Provided, with vegetarian and vegan options. Tell us about allergies when you register and we will sort it.
Code of conduct
This is a welcoming, vendor-neutral space. Speakers talk about problems, not products. We follow the CNCF Code of Conduct.
Thank you
To Mantel for hosting us, and to Grafana Labs for supporting the Grafana & Friends community.
See you there.