OpenSearchCon EU - Fluent Bit & OpenSearch: The Power Couple of Open Source Observability

After my adventures with the OpenSearch maintainers and developers in their booth at KubeCon NA this year, I was excited to share the results of our adventures at their OpenSearchCon EU event.

So with full enthusiasm I submitted a session about the observability power couple that is Fluent Bit and OpenSearch when used together. This would provide the attendees with a good overview of what the CNCF graduated project Fluent Bit, an end-to-end observability pipeline, can do for them. 

To complement and visualize your pipeline telemetry data, OpenSearch was added to the mix and we worked hard to provide a streamlined demo project providing the hands-on experience of setting up the entire integration. 

Let's look at the session and supporting hands-on learning content we are providing.

First off, the session was accepted as you can see in the image below:

The session as it was submitted is described below and will be given on Friday, 17 April 2026 in Prague:

Fluent Bit & OpenSearch: The Power Couple of Open Source Observability

In the world of cloud-native observability, the "Golden Signal" is only as valuable as the pipeline that carries it. To build a truly vendor-neutral, scalable observability stack, look to Fluent Bit for high-performance telemetry routing and OpenSearch for robust search and analytics. This session dives into why these two projects form the "Power Couple" of the open-source ecosystem. One excels at being a lightweight, sub-millisecond processor at the edge, the other providing the distributed backend required to make sense of that data.

What we will cover:

• The "Why" Behind the Pairing: An exploration of how Fluent Bit’s low-resource footprint perfectly complements OpenSearch’s high-performance indexing.
• Streamlined Integration: Practical demonstrations of configuring the Fluent Bit OpenSearch output plugin.
• Zero to Dashboard: A walkthrough of the developer workflow—from containerized deployment using Podman to visualizing live telemetry in OpenSearch Dashboards.

Attendees will walk away with an understanding of the advantages to this couple and access to a free online hands-on workshop: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-fluentbit

When: 17 April 2026, 16:30-17:10 in room Bohemia 1 by Patrick Stephens

As you can see this session is supported by a free online hands-on workshop, specifically the following lab for this specific session where we can repeat what we see in this session as an attendee: https://o11y-workshops.gitlab.io/workshop-fluentbit/#/11

Also of note, I am personally unable to attend this event and I really do not like to back out of anything I have previously committed to. The only solution was to find another Fluent Bit maintainer and friend of mine to take over and crush the delivery of this session. This could only be Patrick Stephens, a fellow Fluent Bit Maintainer who's an excellent speaker in his own right. 

You can find the rest of the schedule online, but don't miss Patrick and this hands-on integration session with Fluent Bit telemetry pipelines and OpenSearch visualization backend. A special thanks to Pat for helping out!