What Nobl9 Is Looking Forward to at SREcon25 EMEA

With SREcon25 EMEA just around the corner (October 7–9, 2025, in Dublin), we’re gearing up to connect with the global SRE community and dive into some of the year’s most forward-thinking sessions.

Our Own Spotlight: Alex Hidalgo on Observability Costs

We’re proud to kick things off with our very own Alex Hidalgo, Field CTO at Nobl9 and author of The Service Level Objectives Book.

Alex will be leading “Your Observability Is Expensive (and So Are Your Feelings)”, a session designed to spark conversation about both the financial and emotional costs of observability. Attendees can expect an engaging discussion on how teams can rethink what they measure to keep both budgets and engineers healthier.

Five Talks We Can’t Wait to See

1. Run, Walk, Crawl: How We Failed Our Way to SLO Readiness (Spring Health)

Adopting SLOs is rarely a straight line. This session by Rob Durst explores the messy reality of reaching SLO maturity one step at a time. At Nobl9, we see this hesitation often: teams know they should start with SLOs, but they are worried about doing it wrong. This talk reminds us that progress is better than perfection.

2. Is My Thing Reliable? Driving Consistency of Reliability across the Organisation (HashiCorp)

Reliability has to scale beyond a single service. This talk by Dominic Hutton focuses on building a reliability data platform and governance model. For customers expanding SLOs across dozens of teams, this is exactly the kind of consistency challenge we help untangle.

3. Taming the Cost of Telemetry: How Riot Games Reined In Observability Costs

Observability costs can quickly spiral as systems scale. Maxfield Stewart of Riot Games shares how they reined them in through a mix of technical solutions and cultural accountability. This session connects directly to Nobl9’s mantra of measure what matters and offers a practical playbook for making observability sustainable.

4. Preventing Avalanche Failures in Large-Scale Distributed Systems (Baidu)

Retry storms and cascading failures can overwhelm even resilient systems. Baidu’s approach to retry budgeting mirrors our philosophy on error-budget policies: clear guardrails that protect reliability at scale. It is a technical angle that reinforces the value of SLOs as a system-level safety net.This session will be presented by Yupeng Wu and Songyun Liu. 

5. Will AI Replace Us or Empower Us? (Stanza)

Few voices have shaped SRE like Niall Murphy and you shouldn’t miss out in this talk by Niall and Stanza. His perspective on AI’s role, whether friend, foe, or co-pilot, adds a crucial human dimension to the reliability conversation. For us, this connects directly to the bigger question: how do we ensure people and automation work together to make reliability sustainable?

Why These Talks Stand Out

What connects these sessions?

• They are honest about the challenges
  
  
• They focus on scaling reliability across organizations
  
  
• They explore what comes next

The six sessions we highlighted are only a small sample of the many great talks on the program. There are plenty more worth checking out from leaders like Liz Fong-Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and many others.

Together, these sessions highlight themes close to Nobl9: SLO adoption, cost awareness, error budgets, and building a sustainable future for reliability engineering.

We are looking forward to Alex’s session and to hearing these other talks live in Dublin. If you will be at SREcon25 EMEA, let us know which sessions you are most excited about. We would love to connect, share notes on SLOs and observability, and talk about what reliability looks like in 2025 and beyond.

The Nobl9 Team