The conference focused on monitoring and its evolution, with a major theme being the idea that "metrics are dead" and tracing and events are becoming more prominent. However, the author argues that metrics will never die due to their importance in summarizing and analyzing data at scale, particularly when dealing with large volumes of data. Metrics provide a method for summarization, allowing operators to visualize or analyze data effectively, and are crucial even in moderately sized data sets. The conference also highlighted the importance of logs, tracing, and events in monitoring, with tracing being a hot topic but ultimately limited to distributed/microservices environments where metrics, events, and logs remain more relevant.