VictoriaMetrics 2025 Developer Experience: A Year in Review

2025 was a landmark year for VictoriaMetrics — defined not only by product improvements, new capabilities, and wider adoption, but by a strong and consistent presence across the global open-source and cloud-native ecosystem.

Our mission has always been clear: to build open-source monitoring and observability solutions that are simple, reliable, and efficient for metrics, logs, and traces. This year, we reinforced that mission through a deep commitment to community, collaboration, and open standards — from conference stages and code reviews to SIG meetings, unconference sessions, and countless hallway conversations.

This year’s talks and discussions offered a clear view into where the cloud-native community is focusing its energy. OpenTelemetry and observability were recurring themes, spanning topics such as scaling telemetry, monitoring increasingly complex systems, and applying machine learning to anomaly detection and troubleshooting workflows.

Security remained a core concern, with strong attention on policy-as-code, software supply-chain safety, and early detection of systemic issues. Sustainability and cost efficiency continued to gain prominence, not only as infrastructure challenges but as design principles.

What stood out most was the emphasis on real user experience. Across conferences and meetups, practitioners shared how teams handle failure, respond to incidents, and improve automation — whether through responsible AI workflows, smarter telemetry strategies, or reducing energy consumption.

A particularly striking theme across the ecosystem was addressing the “elephant in the room”: how much data do we really need to monitor and ingest? How can we maximize the value of our telemetry while scaling efficiently? And are we truly making the most of the data we already collect?

Rather than simply listing the events we attended, it’s more meaningful to highlight the breadth and impact of our involvement. As a CNCF Silver Sponsor, VictoriaMetrics actively supported the cloud-native ecosystem not only through event participation, but also by contributing technical content to the CNCF blog and sharing practical knowledge, best practices, and lessons learned with the wider community.

Throughout 2025, VictoriaMetrics maintained a continuous presence across Europe, North America, and LATAM — engaging with the ecosystem at every level, from large industry conferences such as KubeCon + CloudNativeCon London and Atlanta to more community-driven gatherings like Cloud Native Days across Europe.

We took the stage at many of these events to share lessons, best practices, and deep technical insights on topics including:

• High-cardinality metrics and practical strategies for reducing cardinality pressure

• Efficient and sustainable observability architectures

• Scalable, low-latency log ingestion and querying pipelines

• Best practices for OpenTelemetry instrumentation across diverse environments

• Designing self-observing monitoring systems and closing visibility gaps

• Cost-effective monitoring patterns for Kubernetes at scale

• Scaling time-series ingestion while preserving performance and reliability

• The future of AI-assisted monitoring and the MCP ecosystem

This global speaking presence wasn’t about visibility alone. It was about education, knowledge sharing, and strengthening communities that value open, vendor-neutral engineering.

We proudly participated in major open-source events such as FOSDEM, OSMC, FrOSCon, and the Linux Foundation Member Summit. Our involvement also extended into specialized domains — SRE, Big Data, developer ecosystems, and OSS advocacy — through conferences like SREDay, Devoxx Poland, Big Data Europe, DevFest, and DevConf.CZ. This cross-disciplinary engagement helped bring observability closer to every type of builder, from backend developers and SREs to data engineers and platform teams.

On a more personal note, 2025 was also a meaningful year for me individually. I was honored to be recognized by the broader open-source community with the OpenTelemetry Contributor 2025 Award.

Together with the OpenTelemetry community, we recorded a special live edition of Humans in OTel at KubeCon Atlanta, reflecting on a year of contributions and collaboration. I also shared my personal OpenTelemetry journey in a blog article, offering guidance, tips, and resources for developers getting started in the cloud-native ecosystem.

I’m especially grateful to VictoriaMetrics for the continued support throughout this journey. Their encouragement gave me the space to contribute, experiment, and share what I learned with the broader community.

Beyond code contributions and conference talks, we continued sponsoring essential community gatherings, including: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon EU & US, Observability Day EU & US, PromCon EU, OSMC, Cloud Native Valencia.

These sponsorships reflect our long-term belief that sustainable ecosystems require shared responsibility — and that strong, inclusive communities benefit everyone.

Our impact in 2025 was made possible not only by speakers on stage, but by the entire VictoriaMetrics team working across multiple fronts. Team members engaged with online and asynchronous communities, provided technical guidance and support, contributed marketing assets and promotions, and helped build meaningful partnerships. Whether on-site or participating remotely, their efforts ensured that every interaction added real value and reinforced our commitment to open source and developer-friendly observability.

While conference stages are the most visible part of our work, much of our impact happened behind the scenes. The most important aspect of sponsoring and speaking at events is the opportunity to meet our users — to answer their questions, demonstrate our products, and listen carefully to their feedback.

These conversations are not just valuable; they are the centerpiece of how we shape, validate, and improve our products and services.

I particularly enjoyed being involved with the CNCF Merge-Forward community, which focuses on creating safe and supportive spaces for underrepresented groups in tech. Catherine Paganini has been instrumental in building this welcoming community, and I was excited to join the Neurodiversity initiative as one of its co-leads.

At KubeCon Atlanta, Merge-Forward working groups met face-to-face for the first time to discuss best practices around inclusivity, accessibility, and community support. Our inclusivity and accessibility interview at theCUBE helped amplify these conversations further, allowing us to reach a broader audience and encourage future allies to get involved.

Looking toward 2026, I expect the community to place even greater emphasis on inclusivity and accessibility, highlighting the human side of engineering and technology. Teams will increasingly consider not just what systems can do, but who they serve — and how diverse perspectives lead to better solutions.

AI will continue to evolve, but with a more conscious and mature approach that balances innovation with responsibility, ethics, and sustainability. Sustainability itself will remain central, influencing not only infrastructure choices but also how we design workflows, processes, and day-to-day engineering practices.

As systems grow in complexity, new junior-level tasks are likely to emerge, while creative and strategic work will become more nuanced — requiring a blend of technical skill, critical thinking, and broader system awareness. 2026 promises to be a year where technology grows not only in capability, but also in thoughtfulness.

2025 was an exceptional year because of you — our contributors, users, partners, customers, and community members. Your feedback, pull requests, issue reports, conference conversations, and continued support fuel everything we do. Here’s to an even more collaborative, open, and sustainable 2026.

Missed it live? You can now catch up on all the VictoriaMetrics updates in our last virtual meetup of the year

1. FOSDEM 2025: Roman Khavronenko - ”How to monitor the monitoring”
2. KCD Warsaw 2025: Aliaksandr Valialkin - “Cost-Effective Monitoring in Kubernetes”
3. FroSCon 2025: Jose Gómez-Sellés - “Scale Your Monitoring Solution With the VictoriaMetrics Ecosystem”
4. DevConf.CZ 2025: Aliaksandr Valialkin - “How to Efficiently Manage Logs in Large-Scale Kubernetes Clusters”
5. Cloud Native Bergen 2025: Diana Todea - “Beyond Prometheus: pushing the boundaries of scalable monitoring with VictoriaMetrics”
6. Cloud Native Rejekts Atlanta 2025: Mathias Palmersheim - “How to Use an AI Assistant with Your Monitoring System”