Podcasts about signalfx

In this episode we have a special guest - Doug Merritt - who has shaped not a unicorn but a decacorn - a company valued at more than $10 billion. As the former CEO of Splunk, he steered this big data company to extraordinary heights. In just six years under Doug's leadership, Splunk's market cap soared past $25 billion, and its annual recurring revenue skyrocketed from $200 million to a staggering $3 billion. At its peak, over 50% of Splunk revenues came from security applications.Doug's journey began as a coder and developer before transitioning to sales leadership and eventually CEO of a publicly traded company. His entrepreneurial roots trace back to founding a company called Icarian, which was acquired by WorkStream. He then went on to hold senior management positions at tech giants like Cisco, SAP, and PeopleSoft. Today Doug is the Chairman and CEO of Aviatrix, a secure cloud networking leader that has raised over $350 million in venture funding and serves over 500 global customers.Throughout his time at Splunk, Doug hired, mentored, and promoted well-known executives in the infrastructure and cyber industry, from Haiyan Song to Jason Child to Snehal Antani. In this episode, Doug discusses what he looks for in executives, how he evaluates their ability to succeed, and what founders should keep in mind when building their leadership teams. As the CEO of Splunk, Doug led several acquisitions including SignalFx and Phantom Cyber. On Inside the Network, he shares how founders should think about M&A and what they need to do to achieve successful exits. In our conversation, we'll explore Doug's career evolution, insights from his founder experience, and key lessons learned while scaling Splunk into a decacorn. We'll also discuss his current role at Aviatrix and his vision for the future of cloud technology and generative AI.

Austin Parker, Community Maintainer at OpenTelemetry, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss OpenTelemetry's mission in the world of observability. Austin explains how the OpenTelemetry community was able to scale the OpenTelemetry project to a commercial offering, and the way Open Telemetry is driving innovation in the data space. Corey and Austin also discuss why Austin decided to write a book on OpenTelemetry, and the book's focus on the evergreen applications of the tool. About AustinAustin Parker is the OpenTelemetry Community Maintainer, as well as an event organizer, public speaker, author, and general bon vivant. They've been a part of OpenTelemetry since its inception in 2019.Links Referenced: OpenTelemetry: https://opentelemetry.io/ Learning OpenTelemetry early release: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/learning-opentelemetry/9781098147174/ Page with Austin's social links: https://social.ap2.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Look, I get it. Folks are being asked to do more and more. Most companies don't have a dedicated DBA because that person now has a full time job figuring out which one of AWS's multiple managed database offerings is right for every workload. Instead, developers and engineers are being asked to support, and heck, if time allows, optimize their databases. That's where OtterTune comes in. Their AI is your database co-pilot for MySQL and PostgresSQL on Amazon RDS or Aurora. It helps improve performance by up to four x OR reduce costs by 50 percent – both of those are decent options. Go to ottertune dot com to learn more and start a free trial. That's O-T-T-E-R-T-U-N-E dot com.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a few hundred episodes since I had Austin Parker on to talk about the things that Austin cares about. But it's time to rectify that. Austin is the community maintainer for OpenTelemetry, which is a CNCF project. If you're unfamiliar with, we're probably going to fix that in short order. Austin, Welcome back, it's been a month of Sundays.Austin: It has been a month-and-a-half of Sundays. A whole pandemic-and-a-half.Corey: So, much has happened since then. I tried to instrument something with OpenTelemetry about a year-and-a-half ago, and in defense to the project, my use case is always very strange, but it felt like—a lot of things have sharp edges, but it felt like this had so many sharp edges that you just pivot to being a chainsaw, and I would have been at least a little bit more understanding of why it hurts so very much. But I have heard from people that I trust that the experience has gotten significantly better. Before we get into the nitty-gritty of me lobbing passive-aggressive bug reports at you have for you to fix in a scenario in which you can't possibly refuse me, let's start with the beginning. What is OpenTelemetry?Austin: That's a great question. Thank you for asking it. So, OpenTelemetry is an observability framework. It is run by the CNCF, you know, home of such wonderful award-winning technologies as Kubernetes, and you know, the second biggest source of YAML in the known universe [clear throat].Corey: On some level, it feels like that is right there with hydrogen as far as unlimited resources in our universe.Austin: It really is. And, you know, as we all know, there are two things that make, sort of, the DevOps and cloud world go around: one of them being, as you would probably know, AWS bills; and the second being YAML. But OpenTelemetry tries to kind of carve a path through this, right, because we're interested in observability. And observability, for those that don't know or have been living under a rock or not reading blogs, it's a lot of things. It's a—but we can generally sort of describe it as, like, this is how you understand what your system is doing.I like to describe it as, it's a way that we can model systems, especially complex, distributed, or decentralized software systems that are pretty commonly found in larg—you know, organizations of every shape and size, quite often running on Kubernetes, quite often running in public or private clouds. And the goal of observability is to help you, you know, model this system and understand what it's doing, which is something that I think we can all agree, a pretty important part of our job as software engineers. Where OpenTelemetry fits into this is as the framework that helps you get the telemetry data you need from those systems, put it into a universal format, and then ship it off to some observability back-end, you know, a Prometheus or a Datadog or whatever, in order to analyze that data and get answers to your questions you have.Corey: From where I sit, the value of OTel—or OpenTelemetry; people in software engineering love abbreviations that are impenetrable from the outside, so of course, we're going to lean into that—but what I found for my own use case is the shining value prop was that I could instrument an application with OTel—in theory—and then send whatever I wanted that was emitted in terms of telemetry, be it events, be it logs, be it metrics, et cetera, and send that to any or all of a curation of vendors on a case-by-case basis, which meant that suddenly it was the first step in, I guess, an observability pipeline, which increasingly is starting to feel like a milit—like an industrial-observability complex, where there's so many different companies out there, it seems like a good approach to use, to start, I guess, racing vendors in different areas to see which performs better. One of the challenges I've had with that when I started down that path is it felt like every vendor who was embracing OTel did it from a perspective of their implementation. Here's how to instrument it to—send it to us because we're the best, obviously. And you're a community maintainer, despite working at observability vendors yourself. You have always been one of those community-first types where you care more about the user experience than you do this quarter for any particular employer that you have, which to be very clear, is intended as a compliment, not a terrifying warning. It's why you have this authentic air to you and why you are one of those very few voices that I trust in a space where normally I need to approach it with significant skepticism. How do you see the relationship between vendors and OpenTelemetry?Austin: I think the hard thing is that I know who signs my paychecks at the end of the day, right, and you always have, you know, some level of, you know, let's say bias, right? Because it is a bias to look after, you know, them who brought you to the dance. But I think you can be responsible with balancing, sort of, the needs of your employer, and the needs of the community. You know, the way I've always described this is that if you think about observability as, like, a—you know, as a market, what's the total addressable market there? It's literally everyone that uses software; it's literally every software company.Which means there's plenty of room for people to make their numbers and to buy and sell and trade and do all this sort of stuff. And by taking that approach, by taking sort of the big picture approach and saying, “Well, look, you know, there's going to be—you know, of all these people, there are going to be some of them that are going to use our stuff and there are some of them that are going to use our competitor's stuff.” And that's fine. Let's figure out where we can invest… in an OpenTelemetry, in a way that makes sense for everyone and not just, you know, our people. So, let's build things like documentation, right?You know, one of the things I'm most impressed with, with OpenTelemetry over the past, like, two years is we went from being, as a project, like, if you searched for OpenTelemetry, you would go and you would get five or six or ten different vendor pages coming up trying to tell you, like, “This is how you use it, this is how you use it.” And what we've done as a community is we've said, you know, “If you go looking for documentation, you should find our website. You should find our resources.” And we've managed to get the OpenTelemetry website to basically rank above almost everything else when people are searching for help with OpenTelemetry. And that's been really good because, one, it means that now, rather than vendors or whoever coming in and saying, like, “Well, we can do this better than you,” we can be like, “Well, look, just, you know, put your effort here, right? It's already the top result. It's already where people are coming, and we can prove that.”And two, it means that as people come in, they're going to be put into this process of community feedback, where they can go in, they can look at the docs, and they can say, “Oh, well, I had a bad experience here,” or, “How do I do this?” And we get that feedback and then we can improve the docs for everyone else by acting on that feedback, and the net result of this is that more people are using OpenTelemetry, which means there are more people kind of going into the tippy-tippy top of the funnel, right, that are able to become a customer of one of these myriad observability back ends.Corey: You touched on something very important here, when I first was exploring this—you may have been looking over my shoulder as I went through this process—my impression initially was, oh, this is a ‘CNCF project' in quotes, where—this is not true universally, of course, but there are cases where it clearly—is where this is an, effectively, vendor-captured project, not necessarily by one vendor, but by an almost consortium of them. And that was my takeaway from OpenTelemetry. It was conversations with you, among others, that led me to believe no, no, this is not in that vein. This is clearly something that is a win. There are just a whole bunch of vendors more-or-less falling all over themselves, trying to stake out thought leadership and imply ownership, on some level, of where these things go. But I definitely left with a sense that this is bigger than any one vendor.Austin: I would agree. I think, to even step back further, right, there's almost two different ways that I think vendors—or anyone—can approach OpenTelemetry, you know, from a market perspective, and one is to say, like, “Oh, this is socializing, kind of, the maintenance burden of instrumentation.” Which is a huge cost for commercial players, right? Like, if you're a Datadog or a Splunk or whoever, you know, you have these agents that you go in and they rip telemetry out of your web servers, out of your gRPC libraries, whatever, and it costs a lot of money to pay engineers to maintain those instrumentation agents, right? And the cynical take is, oh, look at all these big companies that are kind of like pushing all that labor onto the open-source community, and you know, I'm not casting any aspersions here, like, I do think that there's an element of truth to it though because, yeah, that is a huge fixed cost.And if you look at the actual lived reality of people and you look at back when SignalFx was still a going concern, right, and they had their APM agents open-sourced, you could go into the SignalFx repo and diff, like, their [Node Express 00:10:15] instrumentation against the Datadog Node Express instrumentation, and it's almost a hundred percent the same, right? Because it's truly a commodity. There's no—there's nothing interesting about how you get that telemetry out. The interesting stuff all happens after you have the telemetry and you've sent it to some back-end, and then you can, you know, analyze it and find interesting things. So, yeah, like, it doesn't make sense for there to be five or six or eight different companies all competing to rebuild the same wheels over and over and over and over when they don't have to.I think the second thing that some people are starting to understand is that it's like, okay, let's take this a step beyond instrumentation, right? Because the goal of OpenTelemetry really is to make sure that this instrumentation is native so that you don't need a third-party agent, you don't need some other process or jar or whatever that you drop in and it instruments stuff for you. The JVM should provide this, your web framework should provide this, your RPC library should provide this right? Like, this data should come from the code itself and be in a normalized fashion that can then be sent to any number of vendors or back ends or whatever. And that changes how—sort of, the competitive landscape a lot, I think, for observability vendors because rather than, kind of, what you have now, which is people will competing on, like, well, how quickly can I throw this agent in and get set up and get a dashboard going, it really becomes more about, like, okay, how are you differentiating yourself against every other person that has access to the same data, right? And you get more interesting use cases and how much more interesting analysis features, and that results in more innovation in, sort of, the industry than we've seen in a very long time.Corey: For me, just from the customer side of the world, one of the biggest problems I had with observability in my career as an SRE-type for years was you would wind up building your observability pipeline around whatever vendor you had selected and that meant emphasizing the things they were good at and de-emphasizing the things that they weren't. And sometimes it's worked to your benefit; usually not. But then you always had this question when it got things that touched on APM or whatnot—or Application Performance Monitoring—where oh, just embed our library into this. Okay, great. But a year-and-a-half ago, my exposure to this was on an application that I was running in distributed fashion on top of AWS Lambda.So great, you can either use an extension for this or you can build in the library yourself, but then there's always a question of precedence where when you have multiple things that are looking at this from different points of view, which one gets done first? Which one is going to see the others? Which one is going to enmesh the other—enclose the others in its own perspective of the world? And it just got incredibly frustrating. One of the—at least for me—bright lights of OTel was that it got away from that where all of the vendors receiving telemetry got the same view.Austin: Yeah. They all get the same view, they all get the same data, and you know, there's a pretty rich collection of tools that we're starting to develop to help you build those pipelines yourselves and really own everything from the point of generation to intermediate collection to actually outputting it to wherever you want to go. For example, a lot of really interesting work has come out of the OpenTelemetry collector recently; one of them is this feature called Connectors. And Connectors let you take the output of certain pipelines and route them as inputs to another pipeline. And as part of that connection, you can transform stuff.So, for example, let's say you have a bunch of [spans 00:14:05] or traces coming from your API endpoints, and you don't necessarily want to keep all those traces in their raw form because maybe they aren't interesting or maybe there's just too high of a volume. So, with Connectors, you can go and you can actually convert all of those spans into metrics and export them to a metrics database. You could continue to save that span data if you want, but you have options now, right? Like, you can take that span data and put it into cold storage or put it into, like, you know, some sort of slow blob storage thing where it's not actively indexed and it's slow lookups, and then keep a metric representation of it in your alerting pipeline, use metadata exemplars or whatever to kind of connect those things back. And so, when you do suddenly see it's like, “Oh, well, there's some interesting p99 behavior,” or we're hitting an alert or violating an SLO or whatever, then you can go back and say, like, “Okay, well, let's go dig through the slow da—you know, let's look at the cold data to figure out what actually happened.”And those are features that, historically, you would have needed to go to a big, important vendor and say, like, “Hey, here's a bunch of money,” right? Like, “Do this for me.” Now, you have the option to kind of do all that more interesting pipeline stuff yourself and then make choices about vendors based on, like, who is making a tool that can help me with the problem that I have? Because most of the time, I don't—I feel like we tend to treat observability tools as—it depends a lot on where you sit in the org—but you certainly seen this movement towards, like, “Well, we don't want a tool; we want a platform. We want to go to Lowe's and we want to get the 48-in-one kit that has a bunch of things in it. And we're going to pay for the 48-in-one kit, even if we only need, like, two things or three things out of it.”OpenTelemetry lets you kind of step back and say, like, “Well, what if we just got, like, really high-quality tools for the two or three things we need, and then for the rest of the stuff, we can use other cheaper options?” Which is, I think, really attractive, especially in today's macroeconomic conditions, let's say.Corey: One thing I'm trying to wrap my head around because we all find when it comes to observability, in my experience, it's the parable of three blind people trying to describe an elephant by touch; depending on where you are on the elephant, you have a very different perspective. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is, what is the vision for OpenTelemetry? Is it specifically envisioned to be the agent that runs wherever the workload is, whether it's an agent on a host or a layer in a Lambda function, or a sidecar or whatnot in a Kubernetes cluster that winds up gathering and sending data out? Or is the vision something different? Because part of what you're saying aligns with my perspective on it, but other parts of it seem to—that there's a misunderstanding somewhere, and it's almost certainly on my part.Austin: I think the long-term vision is that you as a developer, you as an SRE, don't even have to think about OpenTelemetry, that when you are using your container orchestrator or you are using your API framework or you're using your Managed API Gateway, or any kind of software that you're building something with, that the telemetry data from that software is emitted in an OpenTelemetry format, right? And when you are writing your code, you know, and you're using gRPC, let's say, you could just natively expect that OpenTelemetry is kind of there in the background and it's integrated into the actual libraries themselves. And so, you can just call the OpenTelemetry API and it's part of the standard library almost, right? You add some additional metadata to a span and say, like, “Oh, this is the customer ID,” or, “This is some interesting attribute that I want to track for later on,” or, “I'm going to create a histogram here or counter,” whatever it is, and then all that data is just kind of there, right, invisible to you unless you need it. And then when you need it, it's there for you to kind of pick up and send off somewhere to any number of back-ends or databases or whatnot that you could then use to discover problems or better model your system.That's the long-term vision, right, that it's just there, everyone uses it. It is a de facto and du jour standard. I think in the medium term, it does look a little bit more like OpenTelemetry is kind of this Swiss army knife agent that's running on—inside cars in Kubernetes or it's running on your EC2 instance. Until we get to the point of everyone just agrees that we're going to use OpenTelemetry protocol for the data and we're going to use all your stuff and we just natively emit it, then that's going to be how long we're in that midpoint. But that's sort of the medium and long-term vision I think. Does that track?Corey: It does. And I'm trying to equate this to—like the evolution back in the Stone Age was back when I was first getting started, Nagios was the gold standard. It was kind of the original Call of Duty. And it was awful. There were a bunch of problems with it, but it also worked.And I'm not trying to dunk on the people who built that. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. It was an open-source project that was awesome doing exactly what it did, but it was a product built for a very different time. It completely had the wheels fall off as soon as you got to things were even slightly ephemeral because it required this idea of the server needed to know where all of the things that was monitoring lived as an individual host basis, so there was this constant joy of, “Oh, we're going to add things to a cluster.” Its perspective was, “What's a cluster?” Or you'd have these problems with a core switch going down and suddenly everything else would explode as well.And even setting up an on-call rotation for who got paged when was nightmarish. And a bunch of things have evolved since then, which is putting it mildly. Like, you could say that about fire, the invention of the wheel. Yeah, a lot of things have evolved since the invention of the wheel, and here we are tricking sand into thinking. But we find ourselves just—now it seems that the outcome of all of this has been instead of one option that's the de facto standard that's kind of terrible in its own ways, now, we have an entire universe of different products, many of which are best-of-breed at one very specific thing, but nothing's great at everything.It's the multifunction printer conundrum, where you find things that are great at one or two things at most, and then mediocre at best at the rest. I'm excited about the possibility for OpenTelemetry to really get to a point of best-of-breed for everything. But it also feels like the money folks are pushing for consolidation, if you believe a lot of the analyst reports around this of, “We already pay for seven different observability vendors. How about we knock it down to just one that does all of these things?” Because that would be terrible. What do you land on that?Austin: Well, as I intu—or alluded to this earlier, I think the consolidation in the observability space, in general, is very much driven by that force you just pointed out, right? The buyers want to consolidate more and more things into single tools. And I think there's a lot of… there are reasons for that that—you know, there are good reasons for that, but I also feel like a lot of those reasons are driven by fundamentally telemetry-side concerns, right? So like, one example of this is if you were Large Business X, and you see—you are an engineering director and you get a report, that's like, “We have eight different metrics products.” And you're like, “That seems like a lot. Let's just use Brand X.”And Brand X will tell you very, very happily tell you, like, “Oh, you just install our thing everywhere and you can get rid of all these other tools.” And usually, there's two reasons that people pick tools, right? One reason is that they are forced to and then they are forced to do a bunch of integration work to get whatever the old stuff was working in the new way, but the other reason is because they tried a bunch of different things and they found the one tool that actually worked for them. And what happens invariably in these sort of consolidation stories is, you know, the new vendor comes in on a shining horse to consolidate, and you wind up instead of eight distinct metrics tools, now you have nine distinct metrics tools because there's never any bandwidth for people to go back and, you know—you're Nagios example, right, Nag—people still use Nagios every day. What's the economic justification to take all those Nagios installs, if they're working, and put them into something else, right?What's the economic justification to go and take a bunch of old software that hasn't been touched for ten years that still runs and still does what needs to do, like, where's the incentive to go and re-instrument that with OpenTelemetry or anything else? It doesn't necessarily exist, right? And that's a pretty, I think, fundamental decision point in everyone's observability journey, which is what do you do about all the old stuff? Because most of the stuff is the old stuff and the worst part is, most of the stuff that you make money off of is the old stuff as well. So, you can't ignore it, and if you're spending, you know, millions of millions of dollars on the new stuff—like, there was a story that went around a while ago, I think, Coinbase spent something like, what, $60 million on Datadog… I hope they asked for it in real money and not Bitcoin. But—Corey: Yeah, something I've noticed about all the vendors, and even Coinbase themselves, very few of them actually transact in cryptocurrency. It's always cash on the barrelhead, so to speak.Austin: Yeah, smart. But still, like, that's an absurd amount of money [laugh] for any product or service, I would argue, right? But that's just my perspective. I do think though, it goes to show you that you know, it's very easy to get into these sort of things where you're just spending over the barrel to, like, the newest vendor that's going to come in and solve all your problems for you. And just, it often doesn't work that way because most places aren't—especially large organizations—just aren't built in is sort of like, “Oh, we can go through and we can just redo stuff,” right? “We can just roll out a new agent through… whatever.”We have mainframes [unintelligible 00:25:09], mainframes to thinking about, you have… in many cases, you have an awful lot of business systems that most, kind of, cloud people don't like, think about, right, like SAP or Salesforce or ServiceNow, or whatever. And those sort of business process systems are actually responsible for quite a few things that are interesting from an observability point of view. But you don't see—I mean, hell, you don't even see OpenTelemetry going out and saying, like, “Oh, well, here's the thing to let you know, observe Apex applications on Salesforce,” right? It's kind of an undiscovered country in a lot of ways and it's something that I think we will have to grapple with as we go forward. In the shorter term, there's a reason that OpenTelemetry mostly focuses on cloud-native applications because that's a little bit easier to actually do what we're trying to do on them and that's where the heat and light is. But once we get done with that, then the sky is the limit.[midroll 00:26:11]Corey: It still feels like OpenTelemetry is evolving rapidly. It's certainly not, I don't want to say it's not feature complete, which, again, what—software is never done. But it does seem like even quarter-to-quarter or month-to-month, its capabilities expand massively. Because you apparently enjoy pain, you're in the process of writing a book. I think it's in early release or early access that comes out next year, 2024. Why would you do such a thing?Austin: That's a great question. And if I ever figure out the answer I will tell you.Corey: Remember, no one wants to write a book; they want to have written the book.Austin: And the worst part is, is I have written the book and for some reason, I went back for another round. I—Corey: It's like childbirth. No one remembers exactly how horrible it was.Austin: Yeah, my partner could probably attest to that. Although I was in the room, and I don't think I'd want to do it either. So, I think the real, you know, the real reason that I decided to go and kind of write this book—and it's Learning OpenTelemetry; it's in early release right now on the O'Reilly learning platform and it'll be out in print and digital next year, I believe, we're targeting right now, early next year.But the goal is, as you pointed out so eloquently, OpenTelemetry changes a lot. And it changes month to month sometimes. So, why would someone decide—say, “Hey, I'm going to write the book about learning this?” Well, there's a very good reason for that and it is that I've looked at a lot of the other books out there on OpenTelemetry, on observability in general, and they talk a lot about, like, here's how you use the API. Here's how you use the SDK. Here's how you make a trace or a span or a log statement or whatever. And it's very technical; it's very kind of in the weeds.What I was interested in is saying, like, “Okay, let's put all that stuff aside because you don't necessarily…” I'm not saying any of that stuff's going to change. And I'm not saying that how to make a span is going to change tomorrow; it's not, but learning how to actually use something like OpenTelemetry isn't just knowing how to create a measurement or how to create a trace. It's, how do I actually use this in a production system? To my point earlier, how do I use this to get data about, you know, these quote-unquote, “Legacy systems?” How do I use this to monitor a Kubernetes cluster? What's the important parts of building these observability pipelines? If I'm maintaining a library, how should I integrate OpenTelemetry into that library for my users? And so on, and so on, and so forth.And the answers to those questions actually probably aren't going to change a ton over the next four or five years. Which is good because that makes it the perfect thing to write a book about. So, the goal of Learning OpenTelemetry is to help you learn not just how to use OpenTelemetry at an API or SDK level, but it's how to build an observability pipeline with OpenTelemetry, it's how to roll it out to an organization, it's how to convince your boss that this is what you should use, both for new and maybe picking up some legacy development. It's really meant to give you that sort of 10,000-foot view of what are the benefits of this, how does it bring value and how can you use it to build value for an observability practice in an organization?Corey: I think that's fair. Looking at the more quote-unquote, “Evergreen,” style of content as opposed to—like, that's the reason for example, I never wind up doing tutorials on how to use an AWS service because one console change away and suddenly I have to redo the entire thing. That's a treadmill I never had much interest in getting on. One last topic I want to get into before we wind up wrapping the episode—because I almost feel obligated to sprinkle this all over everything because the analysts told me I have to—what's your take on generative AI, specifically with an eye toward observability?Austin: [sigh], gosh, I've been thinking a lot about this. And—hot take alert—as a skeptic of many technological bubbles over the past five or so years, ten years, I'm actually pretty hot on AI—generative AI, large language models, things like that—but not for the reasons that people like to kind of hold them up, right? Not so that we can all make our perfect, funny [sigh], deep dream, meme characters or whatever through Stable Fusion or whatever ChatGPT spits out at us when we ask for a joke. I think the real win here is that this to me is, like, the biggest advance in human-computer interaction since resistive touchscreens. Actually, probably since the mouse.Corey: I would agree with that.Austin: And I don't know if anyone has tried to get someone that is, you know, over the age of 70 to use a computer at any time in their life, but mapping human language to trying to do something on an operating system or do something on a computer on the web is honestly one of the most challenging things that faces interface design, face OS designers, faces anyone. And I think this also applies for dev tools in general, right? Like, if you think about observability, if you think about, like, well, what are the actual tasks involved in observability? It's like, well, you're making—you're asking questions. You're saying, like, “Hey, for this metric named HTTPrequestsByCode,” and there's four or five dimensions, and you say, like, “Okay, well break this down for me.” You know, you have to kind of know the magic words, right? You have to know the magic promQL sequence or whatever else to plug in and to get it to graph that for you.And you as an operator have to have this very, very well developed, like, depth of knowledge and math and statistics to really kind of get a lot of—Corey: You must be at least this smart to ride on this ride.Austin: Yeah. And I think that, like that, to me is the real—the short-term win for certainly generative AI around using, like, large language models, is the ability to create human language interfaces to observability tools, that—Corey: As opposed to learning your own custom SQL dialect, which I see a fair number of times.Austin: Right. And, you know, and it's actually very funny because there was a while for the—like, one of my kind of side projects for the past [sigh] a little bit [unintelligible 00:32:31] idea of, like, well, can we make, like, a universal query language or universal query layer that you could ship your dashboards or ship your alerts or whatever. And then it's like, generative AI kind of just, you know, completely leapfrogs that, right? It just says, like, well, why would you need a query language, if we can just—if you can just ask the computer and it works, right?Corey: The most common programming language is about to become English.Austin: Which I mean, there's an awful lot of externalities there—Corey: Which is great. I want to be clear. I'm not here to gatekeep.Austin: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of externalities there, and there's a lot—and the kind of hype to provable benefit ratio is very skewed right now towards hype. That said, one of the things that is concerning to me as sort of an observability practitioner is the amount of people that are just, like, whole-hog, throwing themselves into, like, oh, we need to integrate generative AI, right? Like, we need to put AI chatbots and we need to have ChatGPT built into our products and da-da-da-da-da. And now you kind of have this perfect storm of people that really don't ha—because they're just using these APIs to integrate gen AI stuff with, they really don't understand what it's doing because a lot you know, it is very complex, and I'll be the first to admit that I really don't understand what a lot of it is doing, you know, on the deep, on the foundational math side.But if we're going to have trust in, kind of, any kind of system, we have to understand what it's doing, right? And so, the only way that we can understand what it's doing is through observability, which means it's incredibly important for organizations and companies that are building products on generative AI to, like, drop what—you know, walk—don't walk, run towards something that is going to give you observability into these language models.Corey: Yeah. “The computer said so,” is strangely dissatisfying.Austin: Yeah. You need to have that base, you know, sort of, performance [goals and signals 00:34:31], obviously, but you also need to really understand what are the questions being asked. As an example, let's say you have something that is tokenizing questions. You really probably do want to have some sort of observability on the hot path there that lets you kind of break down common tokens, especially if you were using, like, custom dialects or, like, vectors or whatever to modify the, you know, neural network model, like, you really want to see, like, well, what's the frequency of the certain tokens that I'm getting they're hitting the vectors versus not right? Like, where can I improve these sorts of things? Where am I getting, like, unexpected results?And maybe even have some sort of continuous feedback mechanism that it could be either analyzing the tone and tenor of end-user responses or you can have the little, like, frowny and happy face, whatever it is, like, something that is giving you that kind of constant feedback about, like, hey, this is how people are actually like interacting with it. Because I think there's way too many stories right now people just kind of like saying, like, “Oh, okay. Here's some AI-powered search,” and people just, like, hating it. Because people are already very primed to distrust AI, I think. And I can't blame anyone.Corey: Well, we've had an entire lifetime of movies telling us that's going to kill us all.Austin: Yeah.Corey: And now you have a bunch of, also, billionaire tech owners who are basically intent on making that reality. But that's neither here nor there.Austin: It isn't, but like I said, it's difficult. It's actually one of the first times I've been like—that I've found myself very conflicted.Corey: Yeah, I'm a booster of this stuff; I love it, but at the same time, you have some of the ridiculous hype around it and the complete lack of attention to safety and humanity aspects of it that it's—I like the technology and I think it has a lot of promise, but I want to get lumped in with that set.Austin: Exactly. Like, the technology is great. The fan base is… ehh, maybe something a little different. But I do think that, for lack of a better—not to be an inevitable-ist or whatever, but I do think that there is a significant amount of, like, this is a genie you can't put back in the bottle and it is going to have, like, wide-ranging, transformative effects on the discipline of, like, software development, software engineering, and white collar work in general, right? Like, there's a lot of—if your job involves, like, putting numbers into Excel and making pretty spreadsheets, then ooh, that doesn't seem like something that's going to do too hot when I can just have Excel do that for me.And I think we do need to be aware of that, right? Like, we do need to have that sort of conversation about, like… what are we actually comfortable doing here in terms of displacing human labor? When we do displace human labor, are we doing it so that we can actually give people leisure time or so that we can just cram even more work down the throats of the humans that are left?Corey: And unfortunately, I think we might know what that answer is, at least on our current path.Austin: That's true. But you know, I'm an optimist.Corey: I… don't do well with disappointment. Which the show has certainly not been. I really want to thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Austin: Welp, I—you can find me on most social media. Many, many social medias. I used to be on Twitter a lot, and we all know what happened there. The best place to figure out what's going on is check out my bio, social.ap2.io will give you all the links to where I am. And yeah, been great talking with you.Corey: Likewise. Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day. Austin Parker, community maintainer for OpenTelemetry. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an angry comment pointing out that actually, physicists say the vast majority of the universe's empty space, so that we can later correct you by saying ah, but it's empty whitespace. That's right. YAML wins again.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

Welcome to Hunters and Unicorns: The Playbook Universe. Today we welcome Dan Miller! Key takeaways from this episode are: • What it took to close a deal worth just short of $100m • Why he never missed his number • Why allies and mentors in GTM community are essential Dan Miller is a GTM Advisor at Loft Lab sand Observable, focusing on revenue strategies. In this Hunters and Unicorns podcast, Dan reflects on his career-defining moments at prestigious companies such as Splunk, Nimble Storage, Sumo Logic and SignalFX. He shares his experience when transitioning from an IC to a Leadership role and the challenges he faced. Dan is a force of nature within the playbook space. His list of achievements is extensive and includes; • Exceeding 100% every year • Closed the larges deal in Splunk's history • Exposed to the playbooks of both John McMahon and Mark Cranny We loved understanding more from Dan about identifying early-stage companies and the right strategies needed for implementation. How can champions really be identified consistently? What are the real impactful metrics when it comes to sales? Dan shares with us his insight pertaining to sales as a science as opposed to an art. He also shares the inspirational story of Mark Cranney and his journey including competing with the Bladelogic team at Opsware and driving a $1.6 billion sale to HP. Dan gives us real insight to the SignalFX story! This episode is not to be missed!

Marketing is already pretty difficult. But when you can't get buy-in from your boss, it becomes near-impossible. So what happens when you have a bad boss who doesn't understand what you're doing? Well, you have to learn to communicate with them. You have to learn to market to them.This week, we're looking at HBO's “Succession.” Its main character, Logan Roy, is about as bad of a boss as it gets. His toxic leadership drives a cruel culture of power, hunger, and cold-blooded backstabbing. But whether his employees – who are also his children – achieve their goals is another thing altogether. Here to talk us through the marketing lessons from “Succession” is Tom Butta. Tom is a nine-time CMO and current Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer of Airship, a mobile app experience company. Aside from being a fan of “Succession,” Butta is an experienced executive who has worked to create billions of dollars of enterprise value for companies like SignalFx, Sprinklr, and RedHat. He's also had his fair share of bad bosses.With his help, we're showing you how to put your message in terms your boss will understand, paint a picture of the future state, and choose the right person to pitch the idea to your boss.About “Succession”“Succession” is an HBO drama/comedy series that premiered in 2018. Its fourth and final season premieres March 26.The show stars Brian Cox as Logan Roy, with Jeremy Strong, Kieran Culkin, Alan Ruck and Sarah Snook playing his children, Kendall, Roman, Connor, and Siobhan, respectively. Matthew Macfadyen and Nicholas Braun also star in the show as fan favorites, Tom Wambsgans, Siobhan's husband, and Greg Hirsch (lovingly known as “Cousin Greg”). “Succession” follows the story of Logan Roy, who is the head of the media conglomerate Waystar Royco. As he surpasses his eightieth birthday, he's considering who will take over for him. The obvious choice is his eldest son, Kendall, who struggles to solidify his place as heir. But the remaining children also vie for the top place at Waystar Royco, pitting them against each other.What B2B Companies Can Learn From “Succession”:Put your message in terms your boss will understand. You can rattle off whatever marketing jargon you want to your boss, but all the acronyms in the world may not be enough. Instead, you need to tailor your messaging to your boss. Learn what's important to them, familiarize yourself with their priorities, and put things in terms your boss will understand. In “Succession,” each of the Roy children struggle to convince their father they're the best heir for Waystar Royco – because they don't know how to relate to him. The same thing happened to Butta: when his former employer was in danger of going out of business, Butta knew he needed to appeal to his boss with an idea to save the company. Butta did some reconnaissance to learn just what made his boss tick. Butta says he figured out that his former boss was a competitive salesman at heart – and that his boss was frustrated because his company didn't have “a seat at the table” with big companies like Salesforce and Oracle. When he spent time talking to his boss to understand where he was coming from, Butta could then appeal to this desire in order to get him on board with the idea that ultimately saved the company from going under.“When you visualize what a future state can look like, sometimes you can feel very alone in that. And so you have to figure out a way to get others to actually not just accept the idea, but in many ways make it their own. And so that means that the way in which you approach the work is to do a couple things. One is to appeal to what matters to them, and then secondly to actually use their own vocabulary and their language as you are presenting this sort of change path.” - Tom Butta, CMO, AirshipPaint a picture of the future state for them. Don't tell your boss what your idea looks like in practice – show them. Make it come to life. Butta had a vision for how to save his former company, but he needed to get his boss to agree. So he  mocked up two articles to look like they were from The Wall Street Journal. One said the company had gone bankrupt, and the other said the company rebounded. He showed the articles to his boss, presenting them as two paths forward. By painting the picture of two future states, he got his boss to change the company playbook. Butta pointed out that in “Succession,” “Nobody is pointing to an outcome. Nobody in ‘Succession' has a path or a playbook. They're just trying to advocate for themselves. And that's why it fails.”Bring on a trusted partner to pitch your idea with. Behind every successful pitch is a great communicator – or two! In fact, it's best not to do it alone. Find a partner who is whole-heartedly onboard with your pitch can confidently back you up when questions are asked. It's also important that they're a great public speaker – and hopefully even better than you are. Need an example? Look at Kendall Roy in “Succession.” Kendall struggles to solidify his place as successor to CEO of Waystar Royco because he's insecure, lacks the charisma required to take on the role, and most importantly, he doesn't have anyone to advocate for him either. Butta says, “It's not just about the idea, the logic, and the compelling evidence. It takes a certain type of an individual who can actually make it work.”Quotes*”When you visualize what a future state can look like, sometimes you can feel very alone in that. And so you have to figure out a way to get others to actually not just accept the idea, but in many ways make it their own. And so that means that the way in which you approach the work is to do a couple things. One is to appeal to what matters to them, and then secondly to actually use their own vocabulary and their language as you are presenting this sort of change path.”*”You can't present the idea of doing something. You actually have to present it. Like, you just have to show it. People don't have any imagination. And so you need to tell the story.”*”It's not just about the idea and the logic and the compelling evidence and all of that. It takes a certain type of an individual who can actually make it work.” Time Stamps[1:35] Introducing Tom Butta, CMO at Airship[2:14] Learn more about Airship[8:02] What's “Succession” about? [11:01] The making of “Succession”[15:05] The keys to pitching an idea to your boss[15:59] How do you effectively use change vocabulary?[18:04] How to speak your boss' language[28:07] How do you choose the right people for your change agenda?[30:09] How do you paint a picture of your idea for your boss?[38:19] Why you should rethink the slide deck as your go-to presentation toolLinksWatch “Succession”Connect with Tom on LinkedInListen to Marketing Strategies that Led to Billion-Dollar Acquisitions with Tom Butta on the Demand Gen Visionaries PodcastAbout Remarkable!Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. In today's episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios), Dane Eckerle (Head of Development), Colin Stamps (Podcast Launch Manager), Anagha Das (B2B Content Marketing Manager), and Meredith O'Neil (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith O'Neil, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.

Max is a Software Engineer and Researcher turned entrepreneur with over 17 years of experience building large scale distributed systems, including streaming analytics systems. Max used to work in Fortune 500 companies, early and late stage startups, 3 of which became unicorns (Veeva, Reltio, SignalFx). In 2020 he co-founded Telmai and focused on building SaaS product in Data Observability space.Connect with Behind Company Lines and HireOtter Website Facebook Twitter LinkedIn:Behind Company LinesHireOtter Instagram Buzzsprout

About ClintClint is the CEO and a co-founder at Cribl, a company focused on making observability viable for any organization, giving customers visibility and control over their data while maximizing value from existing tools.Prior to co-founding Cribl, Clint spent two decades leading product management and IT operations at technology and software companies, including Splunk and Cricket Communications. As a former practitioner, he has deep expertise in network issues, database administration, and security operations.Links: Cribl: https://cribl.io/ Cribl.io: https://cribl.io Docs.cribl.io: https://docs.cribl.io Sandbox.cribl.io: https://sandbox.cribl.io TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Today's episode is brought to you in part by our friends at MinIO the high-performance Kubernetes native object store that's built for the multi-cloud, creating a consistent data storage layer for your public cloud instances, your private cloud instances, and even your edge instances, depending upon what the heck you're defining those as, which depends probably on where you work. It's getting that unified is one of the greatest challenges facing developers and architects today. It requires S3 compatibility, enterprise-grade security and resiliency, the speed to run any workload, and the footprint to run anywhere, and that's exactly what MinIO offers. With superb read speeds in excess of 360 gigs and 100 megabyte binary that doesn't eat all the data you've gotten on the system, it's exactly what you've been looking for. Check it out today at min.io/download, and see for yourself. That's min.io/download, and be sure to tell them that I sent you.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Sysdig. Sysdig is the solution for securing DevOps. They have a blog post that went up recently about how an insecure AWS Lambda function could be used as a pivot point to get access into your environment. They've also gone deep in-depth with a bunch of other approaches to how DevOps and security are inextricably linked. To learn more, visit sysdig.com and tell them I sent you. That's S-Y-S-D-I-G dot com. My thanks to them for their continued support of this ridiculous nonsense.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I have a repeat guest joining me on this promoted episode. Clint Sharp is the CEO and co-founder of Cribl. Clint, thanks for joining me.Clint: Hey, Corey, nice to be back.Corey: I was super excited when you gave me the premise for this recording because you said you had some news to talk about, and I was really excited that oh, great, they're finally going to buy a vowel so that people look at their name and understand how to pronounce it. And no, that's nowhere near forward-looking enough. It's instead it's some, I guess, I don't know, some product announcement or something. But you know, hope springs eternal. What have you got for us today?Clint: Well, one of the reasons I love talking to your audiences because product announcements actually matter to this audience. It's super interesting, as you get into starting a company, you're such, like, a product person, you're like, “Oh, I have this new set of things that's really going to make your life better.” And then you go out to, like, the general media, and you're like, “Hey, I have this product.” And they're like, “I don't care. What product? Do you have a funding announcement? Do you have something big in the market that—you know, do you have a new executive? Do you”—it's like, “No, but, like, these features, like these things, that we—the way we make our lives better for our customers. Isn't that interesting?” “No.”Corey: Real depressing once you—“Do you have a security breach to announce?” It's, “No. God no. Why would I wind up being that excited about it?” “Well, I don't know. I'd be that excited about it.” And yeah, the stuff that mainstream media wants to write about in the context of tech companies is exactly the sort of thing that tech companies absolutely do not want to be written about for. But fortunately, that is neither here nor there.Clint: Yeah, they want the thing that gets the clicks.Corey: Exactly. You built a product that absolutely resonates in its target market and outside of that market. It's one of those, what is that thing, again? If you could give us a light refresher on what Cribl is and does, you'll probably do a better job of it than I will. We hope.Clint: We'd love to. Yeah, so we are an observability company, fundamentally. I think one of the interesting things to talk about when it comes to observability is that observability and security are merging. And so I like to say observability and include security people. If you're a security person, and you don't feel included by the word observability, sorry.We also include you; you're under our tent here. So, we sell to technology professionals, we help make their lives better. And we do that today through a flagship product called LogStream—which is part of this announcement, we're actually renaming to Stream. In some ways, we're dropping logs—and we are a pipeline company. So, we help you take all of your existing agents, all of your existing data that's moving, and we help you process that data in the stream to control costs and to send it multiple places.And it sounds kind of silly, but one of the biggest problems that we end up solving for a lot of our enterprises is, “Hey, I've got, like, this old Syslog feed coming off of my firewalls”—like, you remember those things, right? Palo Alto firewalls, ASA firewalls—“I actually get that thing to multiple places because, hey, I want to get that data into another security solution. I want to get that data into a data lake. How do I do that?” Well, in today's world, that actually turns out is sort of a neglected set of features, like, the vendors who provide you logging solutions, being able to reshape that data, filter that data, control costs, wasn't necessarily at the top of their priority list.It wasn't nefarious. It wasn't like people are like, “Oh, I'm going to make sure that they can't process this data before it comes into my solution.” It's more just, like, “I'll get around to it eventually.” And the eventually never actually comes. And so our streaming product helps people do that today.And the big announcement that we're making this week is that we're extending that same processing technology down to the endpoint with a new product we're calling Cribl Edge. And so we're taking our existing best-in-class management technology, and we're turning it into an agent. And that seems kind of interesting because… I think everybody sort of assumed that the agent is dead. Okay, well, we've been building agents for a decade or two decades. Isn't everything exactly the same as it was before?But we really saw kind of a dearth of innovation in that area in terms of being able to manage your agents, being able to understand what data is available to be collected, being able to auto-discover the data that needs to be able to be collected, turning those agents into interactive troubleshooting experiences so that we can, kind of, replicate the ability to zoom into a remote endpoint and replicate that Linux command line experience that we're not supposed to be getting anymore because we're not supposed to SSH into boxes anymore. Well, how do I replicate that? How do I see how much disk is on this given endpoint if I can't SSH into that box? And so Cribl Edge is a rethink about making this rich, interactive experience on top of all of these agents that become this really massive distributed system that we can process data all the way out at where the data is being emitted.And so that means that now we don't nec—if you want to process that data in the stream, okay, great, but if you want to process that data at its origination point, we can actually provide you cheaper cost because now you're using a lot of that capacity that's sitting out there on your endpoints that isn't really being used today anyway—the average utilization of a Kubernetes cluster is like 30%—Corey: It's that high. I'm sort of surprised.Clint: Right? I know. So, Datadog puts out the survey every year, which I think is really interesting, and that's a number that always surprised me is just that people are already paying for this capacity, right? It's sitting there, it's on their AWS bill already, and with that average utilization, a lot of the stuff that we're doing in other clusters, or while we're moving that data can actually just be done right there where the data is being emitted. And also, if we're doing things like filtering, we can lower egress charges, there's lots of really, really good goodness that we can do by pushing that processing further closer to its origination point.Corey: You know, the timing of this episode is somewhat apt because as of the time that we're recording this, I spent most of yesterday troubleshooting and fixing my home wireless network, which is a whole Ubiquity-managed thing. And the controller was one of their all-in-one box things that kept more or less power cycling for no apparent reason. How do I figure out why it's doing that? Well, I'm used to, these days, doing everything in a cloud environment where you can instrument things pretty easily, where things start and where things stop is well understood. Finally, I just gave up and used a controller that's sitting on an EC2 instance somewhere, and now great, now I can get useful telemetry out of it because now it's stuff I know how to deal with.It also, turns out that surprise, my EC2 instance is not magically restarting itself due to heat issues. What a concept. So, I have a newfound appreciation for the fact that oh, yeah, not everything lives in a cloud provider's regions. Who knew? This is a revelation that I think is going to be somewhat surprising for folks who've been building startups and believe that anything that's older than 18 months doesn't exist.But there's a lot of data centers out there, there are a lot of agents living all kinds of different places. And workloads continue to surprise me even now, just looking at my own client base. It's a very diverse world when we're talking about whether things are on-prem or whether they're in cloud environments.Clint: Well, also, there's a lot of agents on every endpoint period, just due to the fact that security guys want an agent, the observability guys want an agent, the logging people want an agent. And then suddenly, I'm, you know, I'm looking at every endpoint—cloud, on-prem, whatever—and there's 8, 10 agents sitting there. And so I think a lot of the opportunity that we saw was, we can unify the data collection for metric type of data. So, we have some really cool defaults. [unintelligible 00:07:30] this is one of the things where I think people don't focus much on, kind of, the end-user experience. Like, let's have reasonable defaults.Let's have the thing turn on, and actually, most people's needs are set without tweaking any knobs or buttons, and no diving into YAML files and looking at documentation and trying to figure out exactly the way I need to configure this thing. Let's collect metric data, let's collect log data, let's do it all from one central place with one agent that can send that data to multiple places. And I can send it to Grafana Cloud, if I want to; I can send it to Logz.io, I can send it to Splunk, I can send it to Elasticsearch, I can send it to AWS's new Elasticsearch-y the thing that we don't know what they're going to call it yet after the lawsuit. Any of those can be done right from the endpoint from, like, a rich graphical experience where I think that there's a really a desire now for people to kind of jump into these configuration files where really a lot of these users, this is a part-time job, and so hey, if I need to go set up data collection, do I want to learn about this detailed YAML file configuration that I'm only going to do once or twice, or should I be able to do it in an easy, intuitive way, where I can just sit down in front of the product, get my job done and move on without having to go learn some sort of new configuration language?Corey: Once upon a time, I saw an early circa 2012, 2013 talk from Jordan Sissel, who is the creator of Logstash, and he talked a lot about how challenging it was to wind up parsing all of the variety of log files out there. Even something is relatively straightforward—wink, wink, nudge, nudge—as timestamps was an absolute monstrosity. And a lot of people have been talking in recent years about OpenTelemetry being the lingua franca that everything speaks so that is the wave of the future, but I've got a level with you, looking around, it feels like these people are living in a very different reality than the one that I appear to have stumbled into because the conversations people are having about how great it is sound amazing, but nothing that I'm looking at—granted from a very particular point of view—seems to be embracing it or supporting it. Is that just because I'm hanging out in the wrong places, or is it still a great idea whose time has yet to come, or something else?Clint: So, I think a couple things. One is every conversation I have about OpenTelemetry is always, “Will be.” It's always in the future. And there's certainly a lot of interest. We see this from customer after customer, they're very interested in OpenTelemetry and what the OpenTelemetry strategy is, but as an example OpenTelemetry logging is not yet finalized specification; they believe that they're still six months to a year out. It seems to be perpetually six months to a year out there.They are finalized for metrics and they are finalized for tracing. Where we see OpenTelemetry tends to be with companies like Honeycomb, companies like Datadog with their tracing product, or Lightstep. So, for tracing, we see OpenTelemetry adoption. But tracing adoption is also not that high either, relative to just general metrics of logs.Corey: Yeah, the tracing implementations that I've seen, for example, Epsagon did this super well, where it would take a look at your Lambdas Function built into an application, and ah, we're going to go ahead and instrument this automatically using layers or extensions for you. And life was good because suddenly you got very detailed breakdowns of exactly how data was flowing in the course of a transaction through 15 Lambdas Function. Great. With everything else I've seen, it's, “Oh, you have to instrument all these things by hand.” Let me shortcut that for you: That means no one's going to do it. They never are.It's anytime you have to do that undifferentiated heavy lifting of making sure that you put the finicky code just so into your application's logic, it's a shorthand for it's only going to happen when you have no other choice. And I think that trying to surface that burden to the developer, instead of building it into the platform so they don't have to think about it is inherently the wrong move.Clint: I think there's a strong belief in Silicon Valley that—similar to, like, Hollywood—that the biggest export Silicon Valley is going to have is culture. And so that's going to be this culture of, like, developer supporting their stuff in production. I'm telling you, I sell to banks and governments and telcos and I don't see that culture prevailing. I see a application developed by Accenture that's operated by Tata. That's a lot of inertia to overcome and a lot of regulation to overcome as well, and so, like, we can say that, hey, separation of duties isn't really a thing and developers should be able to support all their own stuff in production.I don't see that happening. It may happen. It'll certainly happen more than zero. And tracing is predicated on the whole idea that the developer is scratching their own itch. Like that I am in production and troubleshooting this and so I need this high-fidelity trace-level information to understand what's going on with this one user's experience, but that doesn't tend to be in the enterprise, how things are actually troubleshot.And so I think that more than anything is the headwind that slowing down distributed tracing adoption. It's because you're putting the onus on solving the problem on a developer who never ends up using the distributed tracing solution to begin with because there's another operations department over there that's actually operating the thing on a day-to-day basis.Corey: Having come from one of those operations departments myself, the way that I would always fix things was—you know, in the era that I was operating it made sense—you'd SSH into a box and kick the tires, poke around, see what's going on, look at the logs locally, look at the behaviors, the way you'd expect it to these days, that is considered a screamingly bad anti-pattern and it's something that companies try their damnedest to avoid doing at all. When did that change? And what is the replacement for that? Because every time I asked people for the sorts of data that I would get from that sort of exploration when they're trying to track something down, I'm more or less met with blank stares.Clint: Yeah. Well, I think that's a huge hole and one of the things that we're actually trying to do with our new product. And I think the… how do I replicate that Linux command line experience? So, for example, something as simple, like, we'd like to think that these nodes are all ephemeral, but there's still a disk, whether it's virtual or not; that thing sometimes fills up, so how do I even do the simple thing like df -kh and see how much disk is there if I don't already have all the metrics collected that I needed, or I need to go dive deep into an application and understand what that application is doing or seeing, what files it's opening, or what log files it's writing even?Let's give some good examples. Like, how do I even know what files an application is running? Actually, all that information is all there; we can go discover that. And so some of the things that we're doing with Edge is trying to make this rich, interactive experience where you can actually teleport into the end node and see all the processes that are running and get a view that looks like top and be able to see how much disk is there and how much disk is being consumed. And really kind of replicating that whole troubleshooting experience that we used to get from the Linux command line, but now instead, it's a tightly controlled experience where you're not actually getting an arbitrary shell, where I could do anything that could give me root level access, or exploit holes in various pieces of software, but really trying to replicate getting you that high fidelity information because you don't need any of that information until you need it.And I think that's part of the problem that's hard with shipping all this data to some centralized platform and getting every metric and every log and moving all that data is the data is worthless until it isn't worthless anymore. And so why do we even move it? Why don't we provide a better experience for getting at the data at the time that we need to be able to get at the data. Or the other thing that we get to change fundamentally is if we have the edge available to us, we have way more capacity. I can store a lot of information in a few kilobytes of RAM on every node, but if I bring thousands of nodes into one central place, now I need a massive amount of RAM and a massive amount of cardinality when really what I need is the ability to actually go interrogate what's running out there.Corey: The thing that frustrates me the most is the way that I go back and find my old debug statements, which is, you know, I print out whatever it is that the current status is and so I can figure out where something's breaking.Clint: [Got here 00:15:08].Corey: Yeah. I do it within AWS Lambda functions, and that's great. And I go back and I remove them later when I notice how expensive CloudWatch logs are getting because at 50 cents per gigabyte of ingest on those things, and you have that Lambda function firing off a fair bit, that starts to add up when you've been excessively wordy with your print statements. It sounds ridiculous, but okay, then you're storing it somewhere. If I want to take that log data and have something else consume it, that's nine cents a gigabyte to get it out of AWS and then you're going to want to move it again from wherever it is over there—potentially to a third system, because why not?—and it seems like the entire purpose of this log data is to sit there and be moved around because every time it gets moved, it winds up somehow costing me yet more money. Why do we do this?Clint: I mean, it's a great question because one of the things that I think we decided 15 years ago was that the reason to move this data was because that data may go poof. So, it was on a, you know, back in my day, it was an HP DL360 1U rackmount server that I threw in there, and it had raid zero discs and so if that thing went dead, well, we didn't care, we'd replace it with another one. But if we wanted to find out why it went dead, we wanted to make sure that the data had moved before the thing went dead. But now that DL360 is a VM.Corey: Yeah, or a container that is going to be gone in 20 minutes. So yeah, you don't want to store it locally on that container. But discs are also a fair bit more durable than they once were, as well. And S3 talks about its 11 nines of durability. That's great and all but most of my application logs don't need that. So, I'm still trying to figure out where we went wrong.Clint: Well, I think it was right for the time. And I think now that we have durable storage at the edge where that blob storage has already replicated three times and we can reattach—if that box crashes, we can reattach new compute to that same block storage. Actually, AWS has some cool features now, you can actually attach multiple VMs to the same block store. So, we could actually even have logs being written by one VM, but processed by another VM. And so there are new primitives available to us in the cloud, which we should be going back and re-questioning all of the things that we did ten to 15 years ago and all the practices that we had because they may not be relevant anymore, but we just never stopped to ask why.Corey: Yeah, multi-attach was rolled out with their IO2 volumes, which are spendy but great. And they do warn you that you need a file system that actively supports that and applications that are aware of it. But cool, they have specific use cases that they're clearly imagining this for. But ten years ago, we were building things out, and, “Ooh, EBS, how do I wind up attaching that from multiple instances?” The answer was, “Ohh, don't do that.”And that shaped all of our perspectives on these things. Now suddenly, you can. Is that, “Ohh don't do that,” gut visceral reaction still valid? People don't tend to go back and re-examine the why behind certain best practices until long after those best practices are now actively harmful.Clint: And that's really what we're trying to do is to say, hey, should we move log data anymore if it's at a durable place at the edge? Should we move metric data at all? Like, hey, we have these big TSDBs that have huge cardinality challenges, but if I just had all that information sitting in RAM at the original endpoint, I can store a lot of information and barely even touch the free RAM that's already sitting out there at that endpoint. So, how to get out that data? Like, how to make that a rich user experience so that we can query it?We have to build some software to do this, but we can start to question from first principles, hey, things are different now. Maybe we can actually revisit a lot of these architectural assumptions, drive cost down, give more capability than we actually had before for fundamentally cheaper. And that's kind of what Cribl does is we're looking at software is to say, “Man, like, let's question everything and let's go back to first principles.” “Why do we want this information?” “Well, I need to troubleshoot stuff.” “Okay, well, if I need to troubleshoot stuff, well, how do I do that?” “Well, today we move it, but do we have to? Do we have to move that data?” “No, we could probably give you an experience where you can dive right into that endpoint and get really, really high fidelity data without having to pay to move that and store it forever.” Because also, like, telemetry information, it's basically worthless after 24 hours, like, if I'm moving that and paying to store it, then now I'm paying for something I'm never going to read back.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Vultr. Spelled V-U-L-T-R because they're all about helping save money, including on things like, you know, vowels. So, what they do is they are a cloud provider that provides surprisingly high performance cloud compute at a price that—while sure they claim its better than AWS pricing—and when they say that they mean it is less money. Sure, I don't dispute that but what I find interesting is that it's predictable. They tell you in advance on a monthly basis what it's going to going to cost. They have a bunch of advanced networking features. They have nineteen global locations and scale things elastically. Not to be confused with openly, because apparently elastic and open can mean the same thing sometimes. They have had over a million users. Deployments take less that sixty seconds across twelve pre-selected operating systems. Or, if you're one of those nutters like me, you can bring your own ISO and install basically any operating system you want. Starting with pricing as low as $2.50 a month for Vultr cloud compute they have plans for developers and businesses of all sizes, except maybe Amazon, who stubbornly insists on having something to scale all on their own. Try Vultr today for free by visiting: vultr.com/screaming, and you'll receive a $100 in credit. Thats V-U-L-T-R.com slash screaming.Corey: And worse, you wind up figuring out, okay, I'm going to store all that data going back to 2012, and it's petabytes upon petabytes. And great, how do I actually search for a thing? Well, I have to use some other expensive thing of compute that's going to start diving through all of that because the way I set up my partitioning, it isn't aligned with anything looking at, like, recency or based upon time period, so right every time I want to look at what happened 20 minutes ago, I'm looking at what happened 20 years ago. And that just gets incredibly expensive, not just to maintain but to query and the rest. Now, to be clear, yes, this is an anti-pattern. It isn't how things should be set up. But how should they be set up? And it is the collective the answer to that right now actually what's best, or is it still harkening back to old patterns that no longer apply?Clint: Well, the future is here, it's just unevenly distributed. So there's, you know, I think an important point about us or how we think about building software is with this customer is first attitude and fundamentally bringing them choice. Because the reality is that doing things the old way may be the right decision for you. You may have compliance requirements to say—there's a lot of financial services institutions, for example, like, they have to keep every byte of data written on any endpoint for seven years. And so we have to accommodate their requirements.Like, is that the right requirement? Well, I don't know. The regulator wrote it that way, so therefore, I have to do it. Whether it's the right thing or the wrong thing for the business, I have no choice. And their decisions are just as right as the person who says this data is worthless and should all just be thrown away.We really want to be able to go and say, like, hey, what decision is right? We're going to give you the option to do it this way, we're going to give you the option to do it this way. Now, the hard part—and that when it comes down to, like, marketing, it's like you want to have this really simple message, like, “This is the one true path.” And a lot of vendors are this way, “There's this new wonderful, right, true path that we are going to take you on, and follow along behind me.” But the reality is, enterprise worlds are gritty and ugly, and they're full of old technology and new technology.And they need to be able to support getting data off the mainframe the same way as they're doing a brand new containerized microservices application. In fact, that brand new containerized microservices application is probably talking to the mainframe through some API. And so all of that has to work at once.Corey: Oh, yeah. And it's all of our payment data is in our PCI environment that PCI needs to have every byte logged. Great. Why is three-quarters of your infrastructure considered the PCI environment? Maybe you can constrain that at some point and suddenly save a whole bunch of effort, time, money, and regulatory drag on this.But as you go through that journey, you need to not only have a tool that will work when you get there but a tool that will work where you are today. And a lot of companies miss that mark, too. It's, “Oh, once you modernize and become the serverless success story of the decade, then our product is going to be right for you.” “Great. We'll send you a postcard if we ever get there and then you can follow up with us.”Alternately, it's well, “Yeah, we're this is how we are today, but we have a visions of a brighter tomorrow.” You've got to be able to meet people where they are at any point of that journey. One of the things I've always respected about Cribl has been the way that you very fluidly tell both sides of that story.Clint: And it's not their fault.Corey: Yeah.Clint: Most of the people who pick a job, they pick the job because, like—look, I live in Kansas City, Missouri, and there's this data processing company that works primarily on mainframes, it's right down the road. And they gave me a job and it pays me $150,000 a year, and I got a big house and things are great. And I'm a sysadmin sitting there. I don't get to play with the new technology. Like, that customer is just as an applicable customer, we want to help them exactly the same as the new Silicon Valley hip kid who's working at you know, a venture-backed startup, they're doing everything natively in the cloud. Those are all right decisions, depending on where you happen to find yourself, and we want to support you with our products, no matter where you find yourself on the technology spectrum.Corey: Speaking of old and new, and the trends of the industry, when you first set up this recording, you mentioned, “Oh, yeah, we should make it a point to maybe talk about the acquisition,” at which point I sprayed coffee across my iMac. Thanks for that. Turns out it wasn't your acquisition we were talking about so much as it is the—at the time we record this—-the yet-to-close rumored acquisition of Splunk by Cisco.Clint: I think it's both interesting and positive for some people, and sad for others. I think Cisco is obviously a phenomenal company. They run the networking world. The fact that they've been moving into observability—they bought companies like AppDynamics, and we were talking about Epsagon before the show, they bought—ServiceNow, just bought Lightstep recently. There's a lot of acquisitions in this space.I think that when it comes to something like Splunk, Splunk is a fast-growing company by compared to Cisco. And so for them, this is something that they think that they can put into their distribution channel, and what Cisco knows how to do is to sell things like they're very good at putting things through their existing sales force and really amplifying the sales of that particular thing that they have just acquired. That being said, I think for a company that was as innovative as Splunk, I do find it a bit sad with the idea that it's going to become part of this much larger behemoth and not really probably driving the observability and security industry forward anymore because I don't think anybody really looks at Cisco as a company that's driving things—not to slam them or anything, but I don't really see them as driving the industry forward.Corey: Somewhere along the way, they got stuck and I don't know how to reconcile that because they were a phenomenally fast-paced innovative company, briefly the most valuable company in the world during the dotcom bubble. And then they just sort of stalled out somewhere and, on some level, not to talk smack about it, but it feels like the level of innovation we've seen from Splunk has curtailed over the past half-decade or so. And selling to Cisco feels almost like a tacit admission that they are effectively out of ideas. And maybe that's unfair.Clint: I mean, we can look at the track record of what's been shipped over the last five years from Splunk. And again they're a partner, their customers are great, I think they still have the best log indexing engine on the market. That was their core product and what has made them the majority of their money. But there's not been a lot new. And I think objectively we can look at that without throwing stones and say like, “Well, what net-new? You bought SignalFX. Like, good for you guys like that seems to be going well. You've launched your observability suite based off of these acquisitions.” But organic product-wise, there's not a lot coming out of the factory.Corey: I'll take it a bit further-slash-sadder, we take a look at some great companies that were acquired—OpenDNS, Duo Security, SignalFX, as you mentioned, Epsagon, ThousandEyes—and once they've gotten acquired by Cisco, they all more or less seem to be frozen in time, like they're trapped in amber, which leads us up to the natural dinosaur analogy that I'll probably make in a less formal setting. It just feels like once a company is bought by Cisco, their velocity peters out, a lot of their staff leaves, and what you see is what you get. And I don't know if that's accurate, I'm just not looking in the right places, but every time I talk to folks in the industry about this, I get a lot of knowing nods that are tied to it. So, whether or not that's true or not, that is very clearly, at least in some corners of the market, the active perception.Clint: There's a very real fact that if you look even at very large companies, innovation is driven from a core set of a handful of people. And when those people start to leave, the innovation really stops. It's those people who think about things back from first principles—like why are we doing things? What different can we do?—and they're the type of drivers that drive change.So, Frank Slootman wrote a book recently called Amp it Up that I've been reading over the last weekend, and he talks—has this article that was on LinkedIn a while back called “Drivers vs. Passengers” and he's always looking for drivers. And those drivers tend to not find themselves as happy in bigger companies and they tend to head for the exits. And so then you end up with the people who are a lot of the passenger type of people, the people who are like—they'll carry it forward, they'll continue to scale it, the business will continue to grow at whatever rate it's going to grow, but you're probably not going to see a lot of the net-new stuff. And I'll put it in comparison to a company like Datadog who I have a vast amount of respect for I think they're incredibly innovative company, and I think they continue to innovate.Still driven by the founders, the people who created the original product are still there driving the vision, driving forward innovation. And that's what tends to move the envelope is the people who have the moral authority inside of an even larger organization to say, “Get behind me. We're going in this direction. We're going to go take that hill. We're going to go make things better for our customers.” And when you start to lose those handful of really critical contributors, that's where you start to see the innovation dry up.Corey: Where do you see the acquisitions coming from? Is it just at some point people shove money at these companies that got acquired that is beyond the wildest dreams of avarice? Is it that they believe that they'll be able to execute better on their mission and they were independently? These are still smart, driven, people who have built something and I don't know that they necessarily see an acquisition as, “Well, time to give up and coast for a while and then I'll leave.” But maybe it is. I've never found myself in that situation, so I can't speak for sure.Clint: You kind of I think, have to look at the business and then whoever's running the business at that time—and I sit in the CEO chair—so you have to look at the business and say, “What do we have inside the house here?” Like, “What more can we do?” If we think that there's the next billion-dollar, multi-billion-dollar product sitting here, even just in our heads, but maybe in the factory and being worked on, then we should absolutely not sell because the value is still there and we're going to grow the company much faster as an independent entity than we would you know, inside of a larger organization. But if you're the board of directors and you're looking around and saying like, hey look, like, I don't see another billion-dollar line of bus—at this scale, right, if your Splunk scale, right? I don't see another billion-dollar line of business sitting here, we could probably go acquire it, we could try to add it in, but you know, in the case of something like a Splunk, I think part of—you know, they're looking for a new CEO right now, so now they have to go find a new leader who's going to come in, re-energize and, kind of, reboot that.But that's the options that they're considering, right? They're like, “Do I find a new CEO who's going to reinvigorate things and be able to attract the type of talent that's going to lead us to the next billion-dollar line of business that we can either build inside or we can acquire and bring in-house? Or is the right path for me just to say, ‘Okay, well, you know, somebody like Cisco's interested?'” or the other path that you may see them go down to something like Silver Lake, so Silver Lake put a billion dollars into the company last year. And so they may be looking at and say, “Okay, well, we really need to do some restructuring here and we want to do it outside the eyes of the public market. We want to be able to change pricing model, we want to be able to really do this without having to worry about the stock price's massive volatility because we're making big changes.”And so I would say there's probably two big options there considering. Like, do we sell to Cisco, do we sell to Silver Lake, or do we really take another run at this? And those are difficult decisions for the stewards of the business and I think it's a different decision if you're the steward of the business that created the business versus the steward of the business for whom this is—the I've been here for five years and I may be here for five years more. For somebody like me, a company like Cribl is literally the thing I plan to leave on this earth.Corey: Yeah. Do you have that sense of personal attachment to it? On some level, The Duckbill Group, that's exactly what I'm staring at where it's great. Someone wants to buy the Last Week in AWS media side of the house.Great. Okay. What is that really, beyond me? Because so much of it's been shaped by my personality. There's an audience, sure, but it's a skeptical audience, one that doesn't generally tend to respond well to mass market, generic advertisements, so monetizing that is not going to go super well.“All right, we're going to start doing data mining on people.” Well, that's explicitly against the terms of service people signed up for, so good luck with that. So, much starts becoming bizarre and strange when you start looking at building something with the idea of, oh, in three years, I'm going to unload this puppy and make it someone else's problem. The argument is that by building something with an eye toward selling it, you build a better-structured business, but it also means you potentially make trade-offs that are best not made. I'm not sure there's a right answer here.Clint: In my spare time, I do some investments, angel investments, and that sort of thing, and that's always a red flag for me when I meet a founder who's like, “In three to five years, I plan to sell it to these people.” If you don't have a vision for how you're fundamentally going to alter the marketplace and our perception of everything else, you're not dreaming big enough. And that to me doesn't look like a great investment. It doesn't look like the—how do you attract employees in that way? Like, “Okay, our goal is to work really hard for the next three years so that we will be attractive to this other bigger thing.” They may be thinking it on the inside as an available option, but if you think that's your default option when starting a company, I don't think you're going to end up with the outcome is truly what you're hoping for.Corey: Oh, yeah. In my case, the only acquisition story I see is some large company buying us just largely to shut me up. But—Clint: [laugh].Corey: —that turns out to be kind of expensive, so all right. I also don't think it serve any of them nearly as well as they think it would.Clint: Well, you'll just become somebody else on Twitter. [laugh].Corey: Yeah, “Time to change my name again. Here we go.” So, if people want to go and learn more about a Cribl Edge, where can they do that?Clint: Yeah, cribl.io. And then if you're more of a technical person, and you'd like to understand the specifics, docs.cribl.io. That's where I always go when I'm checking out a vendor; just skip past the main page and go straight to the docs. So, check that out.And then also, if you're wanting to play with the product, we make online available education called Sandboxes, at sandbox.cribl.io, where you can go spin up your own version of the product, walk through some interactive tutorials, and get a view on how it might work for you.Corey: Such a great pattern, at least for the way that I think about these things. You can have flashy videos, you can have great screenshots, you can have documentation that is the finest thing on this earth, but let me play with it; let me kick the tires on it, even with a sample data set. Because until I can do that, I'm not really going to understand where the product starts and where it stops. That is the right answer from where I sit. Again, I understand that everyone's different, not everyone thinks like I do—thankfully—but for me, that's the best way I've ever learned something.Clint: I love to get my hands on the product, and in fact, I'm always a little bit suspicious of any company when I go to their webpage and I can't either sign up for the product or I can't get to the documentation, and I have to talk to somebody in order to learn. That's pretty much I'm immediately going to the next person in that market to go look for somebody who will let me.Corey: [laugh]. Thank you again for taking so much time to speak with me. I appreciate it. As always, it's a pleasure.Clint: Thanks, Corey. Always enjoy talking to you.Corey: Clint Sharp, CEO and co-founder of Cribl. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry comment. And when you hit submit, be sure to follow it up with exactly how many distinct and disparate logging systems that obnoxious comment had to pass through on your end of things.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

Episode 17: Navigating Your Life and Career with Liz Bronson & Kathleen Troyer By the time you've reached midlife, you've taken a few twists and turns in your life and career. Too often, we try to bifurcate our lives and jobs as if one has no impact upon the other, but that's impossible. You can't completely separate the different areas of your life. They are interconnected. Your job and career affect your personal life, and the individual decisions you make in life will impact your job and career. Today, our guests on the Midlife Career Rebel Podcast, Liz Bronson and Kathleen Nelson Troyer, hosts of the Real Job Talk Podcast, share their own life and career journeys and the wisdom they gleaned along the way. In this episode of the Midlife Career Rebel Podcast, you'll discover… Liz and Kathleen's career journeys. The power of having clarity about what you want to do. Why learning to say no helps you become clearer about what to say yes to. How to embrace getting uncomfortable to get to what you want. Why listening to your own voice is so important. The magic that comes from women working together in community. Featured On The Show: Learn more about the Career Rebel Academy: https://bit.ly/3mZ7Mwm Real Job Talk Podcast: https://realjobtalk.com/ The Ambition Decisions: What Women Know About Work, Family, and the Path to Building a Life (book mentioned): https://www.amazon.com/Ambition-Deci sions-Women-Family-Building/dp/0525558810 Liz Bronson is the VP of People at SupportLogic, a Series B start-up using the power of natural language processing to improve Customer Support by predicting and pre venting escalations, reducing churn, and protecting and growing revenue. In this role, Liz is building SupportLogic's people programs, including hiring, performance, trai ning, and enabling culture to attract and retain employees. Before SupportLogic, Liz was the owner of Liz Bronson Consulting- an HR and recruiting company that helped mostly tech start-up teams (SignalFx, Pulumi, Evernote, Hortonworks, and MyVest, to name a few) build their employee infrastructure and hire the right people to enable their success. Liz is passionate about designing authentic processes that match a company's culture. You can also find Liz on LinkedIn and Twitter. Kathleen Nelson Troyer is the CEO of Jigsaw Solutions, Inc., where she works with companies as a leadership, team, career coach, and organizational development con sultant. Kathleen works with her clients to grow strong leaders aligned with company values and contribute to healthy cultures where people want to come to work each day. Kat believes that everyone is the CEO of their own life and encourages her clien ts to step into greater leadership of their lives and their careers. Kathleen founded Jigsaw Solutions in 2003. Before that, she held roles in Staffing and Human Resources with Charles Schwab, Barclays Global Investors, Spirent Communications, Cloudera, and several technology start-ups. You can also find Kathleen on LinkedIn and Twitter. If you have questions about applying this work, email us at hello@carolparkerwalsh.com or reach out to me on social media (see the links below). Check out my FREE three part video series 10 Minute Career Jumpstart [https:// bit.ly/3zWJoz5] and learn what it takes to get the life and career you want. This video series is a game-changer. Need more support creating the career you want? You can do that in the Career Rebel Academy [https://bit.ly/3mZ7Mwm]. Rate, Review & Follow on Apple Podcasts "I'm loving the Midlife Career Rebel Podcast!" If that sounds like you, help us support more people like you to create a career and life they love. After all, the Midlife Career Rebel Podcast would not be possible without you. Click here for Apple Podcasts and scroll down to rate with five stars, select "write a review," then be sure to let me know what you appreciated about this or any other episode. You can also find us on Spotify. And if you're not following the podcast, don't forget to subscribe. Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-midlife-career-rebel-podcast/ id1592972920 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2HxFeNxpf43J4FJRKxEmim And finally, manage your mind, value your brilliance, and courageously take action to step into the driver's seat of your life and career! Want more support to become the CEO of your life? Reach out to me at hello@carolparkerwalsh.com. Thanks for listening, Carol Website: https://www.carolparkerwalsh.com/podcast LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/parkerwalsh Instagram: https://instagram.com/drcarolparkerwalsh Twitter: https://twitter.com/drcpwalsh Facebook: https://facebook.com/DrCarolParkerWalsh

On this episode of Investor Connect, Hall welcomes Ashmeet Sidana, Founder and Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital. Founded in 2015, Engineering Capital partners with great entrepreneurs driven by technical insights and boldly invest before traditional venture firms are willing. They lead and anchor the seed round in companies with the ambition to shape the future of information technology and define new categories. Ashmeet's experience includes running venture capital funds and leadership positions helping build industry-leading products VMware ESX Server and Silicon Graphics WebFORCE. Ashmeet came to venture capital from VMware, where he ran product management for their flagship product - ESX Server. His successful investments include Azure and SignalFx, recently acquired by Splunk for $1 billion, Tubi.tv (acq: FOX). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Concentric, Evinced, and ShiftRight. His active investments include Asimily, Baffle, Kentik, Menlo Security, Nexla, Prismo Systems, Robust Intelligence, vFunction, and YotaScale – in all of which he was the seed investor. Ashmeet received an MBA from Wharton with Honors, MS in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a BS in Computer Science summa cum laude from USC. In his spare time, he can be found planning his second trip to Mt. Everest. Ashmeet shares with Hall what excites him now as an investor and explains his investment thesis. He discusses the state of startup investing and what he thinks will be the biggest change we will see in the next 12-24 months.  You can visit Engineering Capital at , via LinkedIn at , and via Twitter at .  Ashmeet can be contacted via email at , via LinkedIn at , and via Twitter at .  ____________________________________________________ For more episodes from Investor Connect, please visit the site at:    Check out our other podcasts here:   For Investors check out:   For Startups check out:   For eGuides check out:   For upcoming Events, check out    For Feedback please contact info@tencapital.group    Please , share, and leave a review. Music courtesy of .

In this episode, Flavilla is joined by Taylor Udell and Ryan Goldman. They discuss the untapped opportunities of Opensource.Taylor Udell is a Product Manager at FOSSA. She leads the product initiatives around FOSSA's Licensing Compliance product. Prior to FOSSA, Taylor was an early member of the Heap Analytics team. When she's not building products, you can find her curled up with a good book.  Ryan Goldman is VP of Marketing at FOSSA, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He previously built and led marketing teams at Pendo ($1B valuation), Sentry (Series C by NEA and Accel), SignalFx (acquired by Splunk for $1.05B), Cloudera (IPO in 2017), and Cisco. Prior to tech, Ryan worked in international development for NGOs in Washington, D.C., focusing on education policy, social entrepreneurship, and microfinance. He moonlights as a music journalist and founded a social network for music lovers with members in 30 countries. To connect with Taylor, CLICK HERE To connect with Ryan, CLICK HERE To visit FOSSA's website, CLICK HERE Join Tech Brains Talk mailing list for more perks, CLICK HERE To find out more about 3 Colours Rule Agency, CLICK HERE

Today's episode is about building and deepening professional relationships at work, and small changes that can have a big impact on your work relationships, personal brand, and people's experience working with you. Tip #1. No ghosting. We discuss the person, who we never know if they are going to show up to our meetings, and therefore we wonder how much they respect our time. The key here is to look at your calendar regularly to avoid double bookings and no-shows, and to let someone know AHEAD OF TIME (vs after the fact) when you won't make the meeting. Giving someone time back = good. Leaving them staring at a blank screen = not good. Sending the “are you going to make this meeting?” email stinks. That said, we know no-shows happen, and we apologize and move on. That said, “Sorry I missed our meeting, I was in the car.” is BS -- you KNEW you were getting in the car, and you KNEW you had a meeting... you know better, and we're encouraging yourself to do better. *Tip #2. Be on time. *Liz worked with SignalFx for years, and a core value of the company was to respect people's time, so meetings started on time, and calls happened on time. If someone was going to be late, they would send an email, text, or Slack. Nobody was ever left waiting and it was GLORIOUS. *Tip #3. Keep people posted on your progress. *When you're assigned a project, the people you work with are going to assume you're going to meet your deadline. Send an update half way through, let your colleagues know if you forsee any delays, and help people know they can rely on you to update them and meet your deliverables. Yes, it may be uncomfortable to send an update, especially if you're going to miss a deliverable, but setting expectations is key to building trust at work. Tip #4. Be kind. Thank the IT person who fixes your computer. Say hi when you see someone in the kitchen. Don't leave a mess for the janitor. Being kind makes you pleasant to work with. If people like working with you, they're going to give you opportunities. How you behave has a ripple effect in your career. Savvy interviewers are looking for how people treat others around them- it's important to be kind. Tip #5. Don't overshare. Giving the gory details of your latest virus or of your breakup is completely unnecessary. Big picture, “I'm sick and can't come to work” - yes. Every detail of fever, headache, vomit, and malaise - no. Tip #6. Follow Up. Don't ghost. If someone takes the time to talk with you, reaches out with an idea, and especially if you say something like “I want to work with you” or “I'm going to follow up by this date.” Yes, it may feel uncomfortable to tell someone that you've changed your mind, but it's about respecting someone's time enough to follow up when you say you will. Kat and Liz agree that they both will bend over backwards for people who show them respect, whereas they put less time and effort into people who don't show appreciation for our efforts. If you're respectful to the people who you are working with, they'll be respectful to you, and you will build more robust professional relationships.

Abstract of the talk… Open source observability should not be hard. What companies package as their enterprise offering should be available to anyone who wants to monitor their systems. Opstrace is a complete monitoring platform designed for the end user instead of the expert. It's goal is to be as easy to use and operate as a hosted SaaS provider but within ones own cloud account. This is not only up to 10x more cost-efficient but also allows full control over ones data. Bio… Sebastien Pahl is the co-founder and CEO of Opstrace, an open source alternative to services like Datadog, SignalFx, and others... Previously he has worked at Cloudflare, Mesosphere and Red Hat in San Francisco. Building teams and projects. Co-founded Docker, a Y-Combinator startup. Passionate about large scale platforms, developer tools, automation, open source, distributed systems, cooking and photography.

Karthik Rau co-founded and served as CEO of SignalFX from inception in 2013 all the way through the company’s $1.05 billion acquisition by Splunk in 2019. Karthik is presently Vice President of Observability at Splunk and oversees the cross-functional strategy and execution of Splunk's application management, monitoring and observability efforts. SignalFx was founded to help operators of modern distributed applications perform real-time cloud monitoring and observability. Given Karthik’s position at SignalFX and now Splunk, this episode covers the transition to cloud, devops, modern application development and more.

 Episode Summary In this episode of Masters of MEDDICC, Andy talks to Chief Revenue Officer at Imply, Travis Patterson, about hiring, sales, and recruiting. Travis has over 20 years of experience working in enterprise sales, having taken up roles at Opsware, Aviso, SignalFx, IronKey, PTC, BladeLogic, and Mesosphere. Today, we explore what makes a good seller, how Travis goes about finding these sellers, the importance of good leadership, and the emphasis on constantly learning. Key Takeaways “Through the course of your career, you're trying to over index for learning. I want to learn. I want to be in a situation where you're not the smartest person in the room.” “It only feels like it was a fun experience after it's over and you get to read the book, but when you're in it, it's a lot of work, stress, and focus.” “Bad people don't tend to stick together; only good people.” “Part of the pride of you getting to a certain point in your career is that you've worked with a lot of good people, and you've been able to help people further their career as well.” “We can go recruit all we want, but the really great sales people that we want to hire have to want to work with us.” “Intelligence allows you to be creative. It's a really important thing that you can't fix as a leader. If the person you hire doesn't have it, there's not much that you're going to be able to impart.” “If you're smart and you work hard, but you don't take feedback, it's going to be hard to grow in the way that we need you to grow.” “You want a competitive team. Everyone in your team wants to be number one, but they want whoever is in second place to be just $1 behind them.” Learn more about MEDDICC at https://www.meddicc.com .Subscribe, Comment, And Share: Website: https://www.meddicc.com Facebook: MEDDICC Facebook Twitter: MEDDICC Twitter Instagram: MEDDICC Instagram YouTube: MEDDICC YouTube Channel Podcast: MEDDICC Podcast Page Masters of MEDDICC is a show where the world's best sales professionals are interviewed about all things enterprise sales and in particular relating to the MEDDIC framework, including MEDDICC and MEDDPICC.

Available as podcasts on our Spotify and iTunes channel; iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/hunters-unicorns/id1535460339 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5DeTa0QE0WZ1OkX3KX82mh?si=foC9FDrbRMGVGjW4MCBocQ   “Our goal is to make people very, very successful and then create huge enterprise value along the way. That's the goal. There is recruitment as a process, there's focus on personal development, there's real focus on competition, and yes, we have the six-step playbook and the value framework, but ultimately if you don't make those guys and girls successful, you haven't got a company.” – Andy Sadler   Hunters and Unicorns shares the playbooks from leaders, founders, executives and investors from high growth technology companies. In this special edition series The 33 CXOs we investigate the greatest success story in the history of software sales. Discover how thirty-three sales execs from one organisation, BladeLogic, became CXOs in the world's 100 fastest growing technology companies. We uncover the stories and playbooks of the most prolific sales leaders in the industry. Episode 9 features Andy Sadler, GM EMEA at Imply. With a long history in enterprise B2B SaaS, Andy's track record speaks for itself. He knows exactly what it takes to build world class teams and businesses from scratch and has earned a reputation for himself as a strong leader with incredible ability when it comes to ramping the footprint of advanced SaaS companies while simultaneously boosting revenue. Like many of the CXO's being interviewed for this series, Andy's drive and determination to win has enabled him to excel at two seemingly unrelated careers. He started out as a professional footballer playing for clubs in the UK and saw great success on this trajectory, but a change of circumstances led him to transfer his skills to a role in the technology space. Since then, he has soared through the ranks in leadership positions at PTC, Ascential Software, Bladelogic, BMC Software, Artesian Solutions and more recently leading the charge for EMEA market domination at SignalFx.   “Competition is a big one because if you haven't got a competitor, you haven't really got a market and if you don't know how you're going to win or why you're losing, I don't know how you're going to get better. One of the reasons I've loved being in software sales from being in football is, there's no difference. 90% of the game is done on a whiteboard. 10% of the game is how you play and that's exactly what we do.”   Currently on a mission at Imply to create the most revered and feared go-to-market team in EMEA, Andy has spent his career learning from elite sales leaders and improving his knowledge and skillset every step of the way. He is a huge believer in the importance of adapting to change and has a passion for learning which has led him to evolve and realign the time honoured ‘PTC playbook' to ensure success and beat the competition in the cloud era. In addition to improving his own skills, Andy has a passion and enthusiasm for his teams that is rarely seen. A true visionary when it comes to the science of sales, Andy is dedicated to training and uses his wealth of experience and knowledge to develop his people and offer them career progression. One of the core pillars of his playbook is “recruitment as a process” as he believes in the fundamental importance of hiring the right people and then investing in their development. In this Podcast you will discover: • The 3 elements of Andy's Playbook – how he has adapted the methodologies for the new era • The common key character traits of CXOs and highly successful salespeople • How he went from a fearless sales guy to a high performing leader Andy's competitive spirit has led him down a truly inspirational career path, one that we can all learn a lot from. His time at PTC and BladeLogic enabled him to master the playbook in a culture of fear which verified his ability to survive and thrive in a high-pressure environment. However, today we discuss how Andy's thirst for knowledge and improvement has led him to evolve his own leadership style and create a winning, competitive culture based on expectation and development- it's okay to fail as long as you know why you failed. We give you an insight into Andy's experiences in this industry, how sales tactics have evolved since the early days and how to survive in the technology space today. This discussion is essential listening for those with an interest in MEDDIC based methodologies, sales leadership as well as anyone with a passion for the technology space.  

We are on day 8 of or Virtual Race to .conf20 #VR2C. Today we hear about Karthik Rau, VP of Observability at Splunk. First we get a quick overview of what is observability and how Splunk is contributing to OpenTelemetry. Karhik also shares some of the standards needed for building a strong practice. To finish, we hear about how Splunk earned it’s spot in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for APM through it’s acquisition of SignalFX, Omnition and contributions to OpenTelemetry.   Full shownotes here

Tom Butta, Former CMO of SignalFx (acquired by Spunk for $1.05B), discusses the demand-gen mindset that leads to high-dollar acquisitions. On this episode of Demand Gen Visionaries, Tom explains the importance of focusing on marketing fundamentals to see big results, how putting your customers above all will lead to retention and more pipeline, and keeping a company-wide eye to make sure your demand gen leads to more sales. Key TakeawaysThere are three essential elements of demand gen: pipeline creation, revenue metrics, and, often overlooked, customer retention.Customers should be treated as family. They should never find out about a big announcement when the rest of the world does. They should be notified about it before.The most fundamental requirement of demand gen is perspective. Know where marketing is having an impact and make sure customers can find your website.When you spend money on marketing tactics, you need to make sure you’re seeing a return on your investment.Own your content creation. You need to have content that the company can stand behind without question. Quality always starts from within and it needs to be amplified.It’s important to have data to back up your actions. Let your metrics guide your company's strategy, not emotion.Quotes“Demand gen is a function within a function. It's part of a team, but it does not live on its own. It’s reliant upon really good content. It's reliant upon the ability to act appropriately and quickly on opportunities that it creates.”“The validation that you get from customers is just immeasurable.”“Understand that your home is the place that most people will go to and you need that to be your website. You need to be able to ensure that when they get there, they have the best possible experience, but you also need to be sure that they actually can find you.”“You go after the new logos exclusively, and you forget that you can actually have great influence over, building relationships with your existing customers. Those customers are our franchise. They give reason for us to exist.”“My belief (for content) is, it always has to start from within. In terms of turning something over, we did a couple of case studies with external consultants and writers, but for the most part we wrote everything ourselves.”SponsorDemand Gen Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com, the #1 Conversational Marketing platform for companies that use Salesforce and the secret weapon for Demand Gen pros. The world's leading enterprise brands trust Qualified to instantly meet with buyers, right on their website, and maximize sales pipeline. Visit Qualified.com to learn more.

Ashmeet started his career at HP in 1989. He founded Sidana Systems in 1995 (later sold to Doclinx in 1999). He started his stint as a VC at Foundation Capital in 2004. Eventually, he founded Engineering Capital in 2015, which focuses on investing in Tech startups, based on Technical insights. He is one of the few VCs to have been to the base of Mount Everest. In this podcast, he also shares his experience of climbing mountains, one step at a time. Engineering Capital is based in the US and majorly in the San Fransico Bay area, some of its notable portfolio companies are Robust Intelligence, Concentrix, and vFunction among others. In this podcast, Ashmeet shares his thesis of investing in Tech Startups and the approach he follows while evaluating them. Notes - 01:24 - His journey from growing up in Rural India to becoming a VC dedicated to Engineers 02:43 - Purpose of starting a fund focussed on engineers 04:04 - Difference between Market insight, Technical insight & Consumer insight 06:43 - Investing in SignalFx based on its use case - “Enabling cloud-based monitoring and analytics.” 08:18 - Investing in Robust Intelligence based on its use case - “Solving the issue of User Data contamination.” 10:51 - Investing in vFunction based on its use case - “Allows users to take any legacy applications and break them into micro-services & benefit from the cloud.” 12:35 - Is Technical insight alone a sufficient reason for a VC to back a Tech Startup? 15:49 - Making an early seed-investment in Azure Power (India) as an Angel Investor 20:50 - His perspective and view-point on Postman & potential of Tech Startups in India 24:55 - Learnings about Market size with future entrepreneurs in B-schools 29:36 - “Even though Venture Capital attracts the brightest and smartest minds all over the world, but still most VCs are not successful.” 36:12 - “The magic of making a startup successful is to focus on an incredibly narrow problem, that has a wide application.”

  Join the 30-DAY CHALLENGE: "You Don't Know JS Yet" In this episode of Ruby Rogues, James Thompson, a Software Architect at Mavenlink, delves into how to address errors in a service-based system and how to prioritize what errors to fix. He goes into how to recognize the errors when they are creeping in and so much more. Panel Dave Kimura John Epperson Matt Smith Luke Stutters Guest James Thompson Sponsors Scout APM | We'll donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Scout Rails Remote Conf 2020 Links Bugsnag OpenTelemetry Application Monitoring and Error Tracking Software | Sentry SignalFx smartinez87/exception_notification: Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails Errbit Picks James Thompson: Follow James on Twitter @plainprogrammer, Website The Annotated American Gods Luke Stutters: raggi/async_sinatra Dave Kimura: Rubidium Slim Gemfile for increased application maintainability John Epperson: Sharing puzzles with your friends so you can do puzzles during the current stay-at-home era Matt Smith: Pulumi - Modern Infrastructure as Code Follow Ruby Rogues on Twitter > @rubyrogues

  Join the 30-DAY CHALLENGE: "You Don't Know JS Yet" In this episode of Ruby Rogues, James Thompson, a Software Architect at Mavenlink, delves into how to address errors in a service-based system and how to prioritize what errors to fix. He goes into how to recognize the errors when they are creeping in and so much more. Panel Dave Kimura John Epperson Matt Smith Luke Stutters Guest James Thompson Sponsors Scout APM | We'll donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Scout Rails Remote Conf 2020 Links Bugsnag OpenTelemetry Application Monitoring and Error Tracking Software | Sentry SignalFx smartinez87/exception_notification: Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails Errbit Picks James Thompson: Follow James on Twitter @plainprogrammer, Website The Annotated American Gods Luke Stutters: raggi/async_sinatra Dave Kimura: Rubidium Slim Gemfile for increased application maintainability John Epperson: Sharing puzzles with your friends so you can do puzzles during the current stay-at-home era Matt Smith: Pulumi - Modern Infrastructure as Code Follow Ruby Rogues on Twitter > @rubyrogues

  Join the 30-DAY CHALLENGE: "You Don't Know JS Yet" In this episode of Ruby Rogues, James Thompson, a Software Architect at Mavenlink, delves into how to address errors in a service-based system and how to prioritize what errors to fix. He goes into how to recognize the errors when they are creeping in and so much more. Panel Dave Kimura John Epperson Matt Smith Luke Stutters Guest James Thompson Sponsors Scout APM | We'll donate $5 to the open source project of your choice when you deploy Scout Rails Remote Conf 2020 Links Bugsnag OpenTelemetry Application Monitoring and Error Tracking Software | Sentry SignalFx smartinez87/exception_notification: Exception Notifier Plugin for Rails Errbit Picks James Thompson: Follow James on Twitter @plainprogrammer, Website The Annotated American Gods Luke Stutters: raggi/async_sinatra Dave Kimura: Rubidium Slim Gemfile for increased application maintainability John Epperson: Sharing puzzles with your friends so you can do puzzles during the current stay-at-home era Matt Smith: Pulumi - Modern Infrastructure as Code Follow Ruby Rogues on Twitter > @rubyrogues

Cory is one of those people you could spend a few hours talking to. He’s been involved in both sides of observability, from building it his days at Stripe and Twitter to creating tools for it at SignalFx and now at Splunk. His insights are spot on and just fun. We started off with a slow pitch across the plate, “What is observability?”. Actually, while this might seem an easy one, it’s actually far more deceptive than you might think.Come hear Cory's thoughts on Observability, Culture and "What's is all about".

We ask Tom Butta, Chief Marketing Officer at SignalFx and Sprinklr, "What will marketing look like in the post Covid-19 world?" In this revealing conversation, we discuss brand positioning in a noisy marketplace, why giving back is so critical at this time, and how digital marketing and data will reign supreme post-Covid-19.

Autonomy. Mastery. Purpose. These are words and concepts cited by Leonid Igolnik as he shares his thoughts on attracting, building, and nurturing world-class engineering teams as an engineering executive at leading SaaS providers Taleo and SignalFx, who was acquired by Splunk in August 2019 for $1B. "I've been personally successful at attracting top talent because in order to win, you don't necessarily need to be better, but you do need to be different. The good engineers get hundreds of job solicitations every week. What do you or your company offer that makes you different?" - Leonid Igolnik

Leonid Igolnik brings over 20 years of product development and engineering experience. Most recently, as an EVP of Engineering, he drove technology development at SignalFx, a cloud monitoring platform, that received funding from Andreesen Horowitz, General Catalyst, and Charles River Ventures and later was acquired by Splunk for $1B+. In addition, he is active as an angel investor, startup mentor, advisor, and is the co-founder of Angelneers. In this episode, we talk about what does it take to bring a winning product to the market.

In this episode of the SplunkTalk podcast, we interview Arijit Mukherji, distinguished architect at Splunk, and former CTO of SignalFx. We talk about his journey to building great software, as well as the importance of observability in the industry. Video version: https://youtu.be/JfP7-df52uU

SignalFx, the latest addition to the Splunk family, is the market leader in real-time cloud monitoring and Observability for infrastructure, microservices, and applications. This session will serve as a primer into the new challenges and solutions involved in effectively monitoring and troubleshooting modern cloud environments built with microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless functions. As you progress on your cloud-native journey and develop your own monitoring and Observability strategy, we will share three valuable insights: 1) best practices for collecting, visualizing, analyzing, alerting, and troubleshooting these complex environments using metrics, traces, and logs; 2) lessons learned from companies that have successfully reduced MTTD and MTTR, improved developer productivity, and improved customer experiences; 3) a live demonstration of the SignalFx platform in action Speaker(s) Amit Sharma, Director, Product Marketing, Splunk Alberto Farronato, Head of SignalFx Product Marketing, Splunk - SignalFx Products Jeff Lo, Director of Product Marketing, Splunk - SignalFx Products Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/IT3005.pdf?podcast=1577146262 Product: SignalFx Track: IT Operations Level:

SignalFx, the latest addition to the Splunk family, is the market leader in real-time cloud monitoring and Observability for infrastructure, microservices, and applications. This session will serve as a primer into the new challenges and solutions involved in effectively monitoring and troubleshooting modern cloud environments built with microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless functions. As you progress on your cloud-native journey and develop your own monitoring and Observability strategy, we will share three valuable insights: 1) best practices for collecting, visualizing, analyzing, alerting, and troubleshooting these complex environments using metrics, traces, and logs; 2) lessons learned from companies that have successfully reduced MTTD and MTTR, improved developer productivity, and improved customer experiences; 3) a live demonstration of the SignalFx platform in action Speaker(s) Amit Sharma, Director, Product Marketing, Splunk Alberto Farronato, Head of SignalFx Product Marketing, Splunk - SignalFx Products Jeff Lo, Director of Product Marketing, Splunk - SignalFx Products Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/IT3005.pdf?podcast=1577146211 Product: SignalFx Track: IT Operations Level:

We now live in a Cloud Native world where we build and deploy software very differently from the previous generation. Large, centralized systems are being decoupled and distributed to address scalability needs and to allow companies to deliver value faster. Compared to monolithic applications, microservice architectures introduce complexity in network communication, feature much shorter life cycles, and require resiliency in dynamic environments. As companies began to build or migrate to microservice architectures they often run into operational complexity and struggle to efficiently monitor their environments. These challenges have highlighted the need to observe systems differently and lead to the rise of Observability. In this session, we will discuss OpenTelemetry and how it provides visibility into both distributed traces and metrics. We will walk through the architecture including client libraries and collection as well as cover key concepts including annotations, sampling policies and more. Live demos and coding examples will be presented through the talk. By the end of the session, you will know what OpenTelemetry is, why it is important, how you can get started and how you can get involved. Speaker(s) Steve Flanders, Director of Product Management, Splunk Constance Caramanolis, Senior Software Engineer, Splunk Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/IT2950.pdf?podcast=1577146263 Product: SignalFx Track: IT Operations Level:

SignalFx, the latest addition to the Splunk family, is the market leader in real-time cloud monitoring and Observability for infrastructure, microservices, and applications. This session will serve as a primer into the new challenges and solutions involved in effectively monitoring and troubleshooting modern cloud environments built with microservices, containers, Kubernetes, and serverless functions. As you progress on your cloud-native journey and develop your own monitoring and Observability strategy, we will share three valuable insights: 1) best practices for collecting, visualizing, analyzing, alerting, and troubleshooting these complex environments using metrics, traces, and logs; 2) lessons learned from companies that have successfully reduced MTTD and MTTR, improved developer productivity, and improved customer experiences; 3) a live demonstration of the SignalFx platform in action Speaker(s) Amit Sharma, Director, Product Marketing, Splunk Alberto Farronato, Head of SignalFx Product Marketing, Splunk - SignalFx Products Jeff Lo, Director of Product Marketing, Splunk - SignalFx Products Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/IT3005.pdf?podcast=1577146224 Product: SignalFx Track: IT Operations Level:

We now live in a Cloud Native world where we build and deploy software very differently from the previous generation. Large, centralized systems are being decoupled and distributed to address scalability needs and to allow companies to deliver value faster. Compared to monolithic applications, microservice architectures introduce complexity in network communication, feature much shorter life cycles, and require resiliency in dynamic environments. As companies began to build or migrate to microservice architectures they often run into operational complexity and struggle to efficiently monitor their environments. These challenges have highlighted the need to observe systems differently and lead to the rise of Observability. In this session, we will discuss OpenTelemetry and how it provides visibility into both distributed traces and metrics. We will walk through the architecture including client libraries and collection as well as cover key concepts including annotations, sampling policies and more. Live demos and coding examples will be presented through the talk. By the end of the session, you will know what OpenTelemetry is, why it is important, how you can get started and how you can get involved. Speaker(s) Steve Flanders, Director of Product Management, Splunk Constance Caramanolis, Senior Software Engineer, Splunk Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/IT2950.pdf?podcast=1577146225 Product: SignalFx Track: IT Operations Level:

We now live in a Cloud Native world where we build and deploy software very differently from the previous generation. Large, centralized systems are being decoupled and distributed to address scalability needs and to allow companies to deliver value faster. Compared to monolithic applications, microservice architectures introduce complexity in network communication, feature much shorter life cycles, and require resiliency in dynamic environments. As companies began to build or migrate to microservice architectures they often run into operational complexity and struggle to efficiently monitor their environments. These challenges have highlighted the need to observe systems differently and lead to the rise of Observability. In this session, we will discuss OpenTelemetry and how it provides visibility into both distributed traces and metrics. We will walk through the architecture including client libraries and collection as well as cover key concepts including annotations, sampling policies and more. Live demos and coding examples will be presented through the talk. By the end of the session, you will know what OpenTelemetry is, why it is important, how you can get started and how you can get involved. Speaker(s) Steve Flanders, Director of Product Management, Splunk Constance Caramanolis, Senior Software Engineer, Splunk Slides PDF link - https://conf.splunk.com/files/2019/slides/IT2950.pdf?podcast=1577146212 Product: SignalFx Track: IT Operations Level:

Matt Stone is an accomplished Customer Experience professional with a broad scope of industry knowledge ranging from Fortune 100 to leading SaaS private vendors, and he joins Ledge in this episode to shares his insights on growing companies in the CX leadership seat. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We're at Splunk's .conf 19 with SVP & GM Rick Fitz. Rick climbs in the #IoTRV with Cory Minton as they discuss Rick's history around campervans and IT software tools. We also hear about Splunk's recent acquisitions of SignalFX among other new logos to join the family. Rick shares what exactly goes into acquiring a company (hint: its not just the tech) and how AI plays a role in the new announcements from Splunk!

Arijit is a Distinguished Architect at Splunk and passionate about observability. As the former CTO and first employee at SignalFx, Arijit has spent years designing, developing, and managing many aspects of SignalFx’s product. Previously, Arijit was one of the original developers of Facebook’s metrics solution (ODS) and subsequently managed the development of Facebook’s networking tools, data visualization, and other infrastructure monitoring software. He has been focused on the monitoring space for more than a decade, in a career that has also spanned IP telephony, VoIP conferencing, and network virtualization.

This episode of Marketing Trends features a CMO roundtable with Meagen Eisenberg, Harsh Jawharkar, and Thomas Butta of TripActions, Atlassian, and SignalFx, respectively. They discuss how to succeed as a new CMO, the future of SaaS marketing, how to work with a board of advisors, and much more.   Links: Full Links, Quotes, & Notes: http://bit.ly/32ux206 Meagen’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/meageneisenberg Harsh’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/harsh/  Tom’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tombutta/ TripActions Website: tripactions.com/ Atlassian Website: atlassian.com/  SignalFx Website: signalfx.com/   3 Key Takeaways: - When starting as a new CMO, don’t come in with an agenda or preconceived notions about what you should do. Be open to suggestions and feedback. - In a SaaS environment, it’s crucial to be tightly aligned with your CFO so you can plan, understand, and justify acquisition strategies. - Whether joining them or forming them, advisory boards are a great way to gain exposure and form a community.   --- Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world’s #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

There have been Marketing Trends episodes about how CMOs should approach their first 90 days on the job. But on this episode, we talk with someone who is actively going through it. Lauren Vaccarello was named CMO of Talend just before this episode was recorded. Across the roundtable, we had Thomas Butta, who has served as CMO multiple times and currently serves as CMO of SignalFx. On this episode, Tom and Lauren dive deep into how to succeed as a new CMO. They also talk about real-time analytics, leadership, giving feedback, and much more. “Not only is your job to help position your company in a way that you can guide your customers to where they need to go, but I think you also need to be a coach, a mentor, and a guide to your team.” - Tom Butta   Links: Full Notes & Quotes: http://bit.ly/2mEkgw4 Tom’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/tombutta Tom’s Twitter: twitter.com/thomasbutta SignalFx: signalfx.com Lauren’s LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/laurenvaccarello Lauren’s Twitter: twitter.com/laurenv Talend: talend.com   3 Key Takeaways: - When you’re first getting started as a CMO, talk to everyone and get their perspectives. This includes your team, customers, your peers in other functions, and even industry analysts. - It’s important to balance getting short-term wins like feeding leads to sales, with long-term initiatives like category development and positioning. - Take the time to offer in-depth, meaningful feedback. It saves you time in the long run as your team learns to do things according to your preference.     Bios: Thomas Butta is the CMO at SignalFx. As a marketing leader and brand strategist, Tom has helped some of the world’s most successful enterprise SaaS companies in rapidly-changing categories achieve the coveted positions of thought leader and trusted guide to the Fortune 2000. Prior to SignalFx, Tom was CMO at Sprinklr, consultant-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, and CMO of AppNexus, NICE Systems, PTC, and Red Hat. Tom is a Board Director at YSA.org, and Advisor to Airship, Gigster, Kustomer, and Teampay. Lauren Vaccarello is the CMO of Talend. Previously she served as the VP of Marketing at Box and has also held executive marketing roles at AdRoll and Salesforce. Regarded as an expert in B2B digital marketing, Lauren has written two industry-leading books, “Complete B2B Online Marketing,” and “The Retargeting Playbook.” She has also received numerous awards for her work, including “Top 50 Women in Revenue” and San Francisco Business Times’ “Most Influential Women in Business.”   --- Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world’s #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.

Swiftly after announcing their acquisition of SignalFx, Splunk vaults into microservices tracing by announcing its intention to acquire Omnition. Tech companies are rapidly making acquisitions to strengthen their position in the DevOps and contemporary cloud-native software stack. Rick Fitz, SVP and GM of Splunk's IT Markets Group, joins DevOps Chat to share with us the drivers behind Splunk's move into microservices and service mesh tracing. Information about Omnition is in short supply as Omnition's been in stealth, racing to develop a product to address the observability needs of DevOps teams. Omnition has received some notice through its contributions to OpenCensus open source, now being merged into OpenTracing. In addition to this episode of DevOps Chat, check out Mike Vizard's article about the Omnition announcement at https://devops.com/splunk-adds-omnition-to-devops-portfolio/.

“WE” need a forensic accountant for the show. SignalFX gets bought for a billion, Microsoft buys jClarity and VMWare is buying Pivotal…again? We discuss all this and “WE” try to make sense of all this fancy “trademark accounting.” Buy Coté’s book dirt cheap (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt)! And check out his other book that this guy likes (https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6559881947412340736/). Relevant to your interests Splunk to Acquire Cloud Monitoring Leader SignalFx (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/splunk-acquire-cloud-monitoring-leader-200100373.html) VMware says it’s looking to acquire Pivotal (https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/14/vmware-says-its-looking-to-acquire-pivotal/) Microsoft Screws Customers and its Own Advocates Alike - Last Week in AWS (https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/microsoft-screws-customers-and-its-own-advocates-alike/) Microsoft takes big gulp of Java with jClarity acquisition, further boosting Azure’s open-source cred (https://www.geekwire.com/2019/microsoft-takes-big-gulp-java-jclarity-acquisition-boosting-azures-open-source-cred/) Report: Not all open-source software is created equal (https://sdtimes.com/softwaredev/report-not-all-open-source-software-is-created-equal/) CNCF Archives the rkt Project - Cloud Native Computing Foundation (https://www.cncf.io/blog/2019/08/16/cncf-archives-the-rkt-project/) IDC Survey Finds Artificial Intelligence to be a Priority for Organizations But Few Have Implemented an Enterprise-Wide Strategy (https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS45344519) Backdoor code found in 11 Ruby libraries | ZDNet (https://www.zdnet.com/article/backdoor-code-found-in-11-ruby-libraries/) Exclusive: Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg on what’s next for Tumblr (https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisition-matt-mullenweg-ceo-automattic-wordpress-verizon-changes-vergecast) PodPass: Proposal for an Open Protocol to Enable Direct Listener Relationships (https://medium.com/radio-public/podpass-proposal-for-an-open-protocol-to-enable-direct-listener-relationships-b9cff232f9dc) Podcasts get that VC cash (https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-media-trends-e8233eac-4074-4007-9f6a-ccef41b1cba5.html?chunk=3&utm_term=twsocialshare#story3) WeWork isn’t a tech company; it’s a soap opera (https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/15/20806366/we-company-wework-ipo-adam-neumann) Forget monoliths vs. microservices. Cognitive load is what matters (https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/forget-monoliths-vs-microservices-cognitive-load-what-matters) Everything You Need to Know About the Apple Card I Did Not Need (https://onezero.medium.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-apple-card-i-did-not-need-472a1ee0ca43) Sunsetting Mercurial support in Bitbucket - Bitbucket (https://bitbucket.org/blog/sunsetting-mercurial-support-in-bitbucket) Intel, Google, Microsoft, and others launch Confidential Computing Consortium for data security (https://venturebeat.com/2019/08/21/intel-google-microsoft-and-others-launch-confidential-computing-consortium-for-data-security/) Introducing Cloud Run Button: Click-to-deploy your git repos to Google Cloud | Google Cloud Blog (https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/serverless/introducing-cloud-run-button-click-to-deploy-your-git-repos-to-google-cloud) Gene Kim on the Nokia book (https://twitter.com/RealGeneKim/status/1163972487513690112) Nonsense Remote Shell and File Editing with Emacs' TRAMP Mode (https://mattray.github.io/2019/03/11/vagrant-and-emacs-tramp-mode.html) Harvard Just Discovered that PowerPoint is Worse Than Useless (https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/harvard-just-discovered-that-powerpoint-is-worse-than-useless.html) Air New Zealand is Crazy About Rugby (https://twitter.com/FlyAirNZ/status/1162484533905616896) Sponsors This episode is sponsored by SolarWinds® and one of their application performance monitoring tools, Papertrail. To learn more or to try SolarWinds Papertrail for free, go to http://papertrailapp.com/sdt. Conferences, et. al. August 30th - Agile Scotland, Glasgow (https://www.agilescotland.com/august) - Coté giving 90 minute workshop (https://www.agilescotland.com/august#comp-jwjlafj0__item1inlineContent-gridWrapper). Use the code AS-SPEAKER-MICHAEL for a discount: from £70 to £56.13. Sep 26th to 27th - DevOpsDays London (https://devopsdays.org/events/2019-london/welcome/) - Coté at the Pivotal table, come get free shit. Oct 7th to 10th - SpringOne Platform, Oct 7th to 10th, Austin Texas (https://springoneplatform.io/) - get $200 off registration before August 20th, and $200 more if you use the code S1P200_Coté (make sure to use the accented e). Come to the EMEA party (https://connect.pivotal.io/EMEA-Cocktail-Reception-S1P-2019.html) if you’re in EMEA. Oct 9th to 10th - Cloud Expo Asia (https://www.cloudexpoasia.com/) Singapore, Oct 9th and 10th Oct 10th to 11th - DevOpsDays Sydney 2019 (http://devopsdays.org/events/2019-sydney/), October 10th and 11th December - 2019, a city near you: The 2019 SpringOne Tours are posted (http://springonetour.io/): Toronto Dec 2nd and 3rd (https://springonetour.io/2019/toronto), São Paulo Dec 11th and 12th (https://springonetour.io/2019/sao-paulo). December 12-13 2019 - Kubernetes Summit Sydney (https://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/kubernetes-summit-sydney-2019/) Listener Feedback Daniel Dunbar is hiring Senior Distributed Systems Engineers (https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200075384/distributed-systems-engineer) for a project at Apple in Cupertino SDT news & hype Join us in Slack (http://www.softwaredefinedtalk.com/slack). Send your postal address to stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com (mailto:stickers@softwaredefinedtalk.com) and we will send you free laptop stickers! Follow us on Twitter (https://twitter.com/softwaredeftalk), Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/softwaredefinedtalk/) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/software-defined-talk/) Listen to the Software Defined Interviews Podcast (https://www.softwaredefinedinterviews.com/). Check out the back catalog (http://cote.coffee/howtotech/). Brandon built the Quick Concall iPhone App (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/quick-concall/id1399948033?mt=8) and he wants you to buy it for $0.99. Use the code SDT to get $20 off Coté’s book, (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt) Digital WTF (https://leanpub.com/digitalwtf/c/sdt), so $5 total. Recommendations Brandon: Wyze Cam (https://www.wyze.com/wyze-cam/) Matt: David Byrne on the Long Now Foundation (http://longnow.org/seminars/02019/jun/04/good-news-sleeping-beauties/) Intro and Outro: SDT Theme (https://github.com/charleswhollien/softwaredefinedsong) Cover Art Image by Chris Pastrick (https://pixabay.com/users/cpastrick-35190/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1428230) Chris Pastrick from Pixabay (https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=1428230)

“Culture has to be deliberate. It's first and foremost reflected by the people that you have, the leadership and the kinds of decisions that they make on a day to day basis. It's not values you put up on a wall.” - Karthik Rau Karthik Rau is currently the co-founder and CEO of SignalFx, but he is a Silicon Valley original. His experience goes back to the beginning of the dot-com boom, and his early involvement includes hopping on the VMware rocket ship right as it was taking off. By the time he was starting SignalFx, the Internet was running full force, but the cloud was still in its infancy.  On this episode, Karthik (with some help from Thomas Butta, SignalFx CMO) explains the journey he’s taken through the early days of the Internet to his role now as a very technical CEO.  “There's no one size fits all, every leader is unique. Every company is unique, and it depends on the individuals and the circumstances. There's a different kind of grit, background, and mentality needed when you're getting something started from zero to one…. What I've observed is that my role keeps changing every 18 to 24 months as the company gets from one stage to the next.” Tune in as Karthik explains what it means to be a CEO and how to build a positive company culture, and shares personal stories about his successes and failures along the way. —  Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

“There’s an offense, a defense, there's a special team and there’s an attention to detail. I really applied that when I decided to go into sales right after school. I was going to be a pro. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right.” Mark Cranney expects whatever business he’s a part of to run with the efficiency of a football team running a play they’ve done a hundred times before. He learned a lot of lessons from his time on the field when he was in high school and college, and he’s found a way to take those experiences from the field to the boardroom. Mark currently serves as the COO of SignalFX, a SaaS-based monitoring and analytics platform for cloud-native companies to monitor their online and digital infrastructure. Prior to that, he had a seven-year stint at the renowned venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In today’s episode, Mark and Ian sit down to discuss Mark’s background in the venture capital space, why he got out of that to join the team at SignalFX and his approach to recruiting and developing the most talented people in any given field. We just announced our newest partnership with b8ta! b8ta.com gives you access to some of the most innovative and cutting edge consumer tech products. This week, we're giving away a ChiliPad, a sleep system that helps you regulate the temperature of your bed while you rest. Enter the give away for a chance to win! Quotes: 17:48- “I like the granularity of operating on a day to day basis, particularly when you can do it across the sales side, marketing, customer success and back into to the product piece and make sure you are building great products and great experiences for your customers.” 18:40- [On leaving venture capital to start SignalFX]- It’s funner at the point of the spear. Ya know, getting shot at and shooting back is a lot funner.” 29:51- [Advice for young entrepreneurs] “Understand what your hiring criteria is, what it’s going to take to be successful, be able to articulate that- write it down.” Mission Daily and all of our podcasts are created with love by our team at Mission.org We own and operate a network of podcasts, and brand story studio designed to accelerate learning. Our clients include companies like Salesforce, Twilio, and Katerra who work with us because we produce results. To learn more and get our case studies, check out Mission.org/Studios. If you’re tired of media and news that promotes fear, uncertainty, and doubt and want an antidote, you’ll want to subscribe to our daily newsletter at Mission.org. When you do, you’ll receive a mission-driven newsletter every morning that will help you start your day off right!

Throughout his career, Arijit Mukherji (LinkedIn, Twitter) has been able to learn, innovate and lead. As the CTO of SignalFx, he gets to do all those things at once. On this episode of IT Visionaries, Arijit details his rise through the tech industry, including a number of years at Facebook in the midst of its massive growth. Plus, he explains why he wanted to take a risk and join SignalFx, and what it was like rising from Employee No. 1 to the role of CTO. IT Visionaries is brought to you by The Lightning Platform by Salesforce. The Lightning Platform is a leading cloud platform that makes building AI-powered apps faster and easier. With Salesforce, now everyone is empowered to build apps for their organization! Learn more at salesforce.com/buildmobileapps. Salesforce and MIT recently teamed up to create a whitepaper exploring what happens when AI meets CRM. Read: AI Meets CRM: An MIT Tech Review Whitepaper Salesforce just introduced Salesforce Blockchain, the industry's first truly declarative blockchain platform, integrated into your CRM. Learn more at https://sforce.co/2wl7IeO.

SignalFx just announced a $75m dollar round of financing, bringing their total raise to date to $179m. This is an impressive war chest that allows SignalFx to continue it mission of bringing next generation Cloud Monitoring to large enterprises. In this DevOps Chat we sat down with SignalFx CEO and co-founder, Karthik Rau to discuss what were the big trends he and the team bet on early in SignalFx's development which have allowed them to capitalize on the opportunity in the cloud monitoring market. Karthik also gives us his vision for where the market is heading and what SignalFx is going to use these funds for to stay at the forefront. Congrats to Karthik and the SignalFx team.

Marketers are used to rocket launching the message out to their buyers, creating eye catching explosions with their brand, and nurturing their prospects by sharing, sharing, sharing. Sometimes, marketers need a reminder to listen. An award winning Marketing Leader, Brand Strategist, and the CMO of SignalFx, Tom Butta, reminds marketers to listen to prospects and customers, learn the pain points, and own the problem. This episode is filled with “nuggets” of wisdom, that will challenge, encourage, and guide marketers on their journey.   Takeaways: Be concerned about what your prospects and customers think of your brand. Be open to what the other groups think, but compare it to your buyers' concerns. Be open and curious to what others are suggesting. Think about what they say. People are often too concerned with waiting to be in the conversation that they are not listening to the ideas in front of them. Listen, listen, listen! When creating a marketing plan, listen to the executives of the company, to the clients, and prospects. Compare what they are all saying and search for the “nuggets” that could be ideas for your plan. Consider the emotion that your product and/or service is trying satisfy with the solution you are providing and then market to that emotion. Be the guide on the buyer's journey rather than the advisor. An advisor provides suggestions but then they are not there with you in the process. Guide your customers in their journey, empathize and be with them. Own the problem that your buyer is facing to market how your product and/or service is the solution. Gather customer references that want to share their positive experience. In today's social media age, it's not about what “we” say, it's about what “they” say. Prospects look at the reviews and testimonials before going directly to the source. Mobilize the believers in your brand. If your brand has a huge following. Provide a platform for your believers to communicate why they love your brand. People never forget how you make them feel. “Don't be afraid to take on something new or try something new because you're going to learn something.”-Tom Butta Be open to learning about the experience that is in front of you, and look at it as an opportunity.   Links: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tombutta/ Twitter: @ThomasButta ‏ SignalFx Website: https://www.signalfx.com/ SignalFx Twitter: @signalfx   Busted Myths A lot of people know a lot about marketing and you should heed their opinion about your branding, strategy, and logo. This is not necessarily true. Everybody has an opinion and they have the freedom to express it, however, you should be paying attention to the opinion of your buyers and future prospects. What do your customers think of your brand? In marketing, it's best to give your prospects an information overload and tell them all the good things about your product and/or service. Giving your buyers information overload sounds salesy and just creates noise that does not allow them to pinpoint how your brand could truly help them. Get to know your buyers first, learn their pain points and then inform them how your product and/or service can help. 

Every marketer knows that customer experience is important. But Thomas Butta, CMO at SignalFX, takes it a step further. According to Tom, experience is the new brand. On this episode, Tom explains what he means by this, and discusses how to succeed as a challenger brand. He is also joined by SignalFX Chief Architect Rajesh Raman, who talks about their collaboration together. For full notes and show notes, click here. Tom's Twitter: twitter.com/thomasbutta Tom's LinkedIn:  linkedin.com/in/tombutta SignalFX Website: signalfx.com Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.  

Rajesh Raman (Twitter, LinkedIn) is the Chief Architect for SignalFx. What does that mean? In this episode, Rajesh and Ian dive into his role and how he focuses on not just the implementation of systems and processes at SignalFx, but also the best strategies and practices that will be needed months down the line. They also go into Rajesh’s history at Google and Facebook, and discuss cloud technology and the future of the industry. Topics Discussed: Cloud platforms, app development, innovation, coding, monitoring, observability, microservices. IT Visionaries is brought to you by The Lightning Platform by Salesforce. The Lightning Platform is a leading cloud platform that makes building AI-powered apps faster and easier. With Salesforce, now everyone is empowered to build apps for their organization! Learn more at salesforce.com/buildmobileapps. Salesforce and MIT recently teamed up to create a whitepaper exploring what happens when AI meets CRM. Read: AI Meets CRM: An MIT Tech Review Whitepaper

This week, I talk with Cory Watson, Technical Director in the Office of the CTO at SignalFx. Formerly having run Observability at both Stripe and Twitter, we discuss his switch from being the customer to working for the enemy--er, a vendor. What has the transition been like? How can you work effectively with your vendors? We also dig into Cory’s current and ongoing research into accessibility (a11y) in monitoring tools.

We sat down with Thomas Butta, CMO of SignalFX, to talk about how to make your marketing cut through the noise of the modern digital world. On this episode, Tom also discusses challenger brands and how to make your brand an industry thought leader. Click here for links, quotes, and full show notes. Marketing Trends is brought to you by our friends at Salesforce Pardot, B2B marketing automation on the world's #1 CRM. Are you ready to take your B2B marketing to new heights? With Pardot, marketers can find and nurture leads, close more deals, and maximize ROI. Learn more by heading to www.pardot.com/podcast. To learn more or subscribe to our weekly newsletter, visit MarketingTrends.com.  

The service mesh is becoming the most critical component of the cloud-native stack, with users ranging from small startups to Internet giants and traditional enterprises. While still early in terms of adoption, this new infrastructure layer has massive implications for the way companies build and operate distributed systems. In this session, SignalFx provides an overview of distributed systems and service instrumentation, then examines how a service mesh approach addresses inter-service communication, testing, and other fundamental challenges of adopting microservices architecture. Learn about the considerations for monitoring and observability, as well as the trade-offs, of implementing service mesh. This session is brought to you by AWS partner, SignalFx.

On this 1x1 interview with Mark Cranney, the Chief Commercial Officer of SignalFx, we chat about the key elements of sales leadership and his journey to being a top VP of Sales.

On this 1x1 interview with Mark Cranney, the Chief Commercial Officer of SignalFx, we chat about the key elements of sales leadership and his journey to being a top VP of Sales.

SignalFX is a company hitting its stride by providing a quality solution to large enterprises. The company recently announced a new round of capital with a $45m raise. We chat with CEO Karthik Rau about what this means for the future of the company and what it means for the modern applications that we are seeing deployed today.

What happens when monolithic architectures are broken down into containers and microservices (or when things are broken down into smaller units, not just in infrastructure but perhaps even in company structure too)? From building more dynamic websites to monitoring the enterprise cloud to elastically scaling applications, where are developers in the enterprise going now and next? This episode of the a16z Podcast, based on a panel by and for developers recorded at the a16z Summit in November 2017 and moderated by general partner Martin Casado, features Matt Billmann, CEO and co-founder of Netlify; Florian Leibert, CEO and co-founder of Mesophere; and Karthik Rau, CEO and co-founder of SignalFX. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

Hubspot relies on the performance of their business-critical cloud applications; any emerging issues must be addressed immediately. Running a microservices environment made up of thousands of instances to support 45 different teams means that unexpected changes can have a major impact. Manual intervention is often not fast enough to catch emerging anomalies and to maintain the level of availability required. In this session, we discuss how we've built our own tooling around our CD pipeline and how we've utilized automation to exponentially improve our MTTR. Learn how: Hubspot manages a microservices environment to enable hundreds of deployments a day; leveraging SignalFx detectors help proactively determine emerging issues; automatically invoking AWS services reduces usage-related failures; visibility across an entire AWS environment improves MTTR. Session Sponosored by: SignalFx 

Building out an SDR team is is no easy task in the world of business software. Many founders are curious about the allure of these programs as you never seem to have enough pipeline. Founders have probably heard about amazing resources called Sales Development Reps (SDR) that should generate a ton of inbound for your company. Today, we were joined on the podcast by Shelley McNary, the VP of Sales at Bill.com to discuss  "Building Out An SDR Team" as well as the specifics behind how and when do this at your software company. Shelley knows a thing or two about the topic having led inside sales efforts for companies like Taleo, MapR, and SignalFX.

Building out an SDR team is is no easy task in the world of business software. Many founders are curious about the allure of these programs as you never seem to have enough pipeline. Founders have probably heard about amazing resources called Sales Development Reps (SDR) that should generate a ton of inbound for your company. Today, we were joined on the podcast by Shelley McNary, the VP of Sales at Bill.com to discuss  "Building Out An SDR Team" as well as the specifics behind how and when do this at your software company. Shelley knows a thing or two about the topic having led inside sales efforts for companies like Taleo, MapR, and SignalFX.

Patrick Lin, VP of Products & Marketing at SignalFX (@SignalFX), joins us this week on The Hot Aisle to talk about monitoring the Billions and Trillions of streaming events that happen in a modern Cloud Native application architecture. Your hosts Brent Piatti (@BrentPiatti) and Brian Carpenter (@intheDC) break down why capturing these real-time events is […]

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: "In Search of Certainty," Promise Theory, and scaling the computational net.Aneel Lakhani, director of marketing at SignalFx, chats with Mark Burgess, professor emeritus of network and system administration, former founder and CTO of CFEngine, and now an independent technologist and researcher. They talk about the new edition of Burgess' book, In Search of Certainty, Promise Theory and how promises are a kind of service model, and ways of applying promise-oriented thinking to networks.Here are a few highlights from their chat: We tend to separate our narrative about computer science from the narrative of physics and biology and these other sciences. Many of the ideas of course, all of the ideas, that computers are based on originate in these other sciences. I felt it was important to weave computer science into that historical narrative and write the kind of book that I loved to read when I was a teenager, a popular science book explaining ideas, and popularizing some of those ideas, and weaving a story around it to hopefully create a wider understanding. I think one of the things that struck me as I was writing [In Search of Certainty], is it all goes back to scales. This is a very physicist point of view. When you measure the world, when you observe the world, when you characterize it even, you need a sense of something to measure it by. ... I started the book explaining how scales affect the way we describe systems in physics. By scale, I mean the order of magnitude. ... The descriptions of systems are often qualitatively different with these different scales. ... Part of my work over the years has been trying to find out how we could invent the measuring scale for semantics. This is how so-called Promise Theory came about. I think this notion of scale and how we apply it to systems is hugely important. You're always trying to find the balance between the forces of destruction and the forces of repair. There are two ways you can repair a system. One is that you can just wait until it fails and then repair it very fast, and try to maintain an equilibrium like that. We do that when we break a leg or when we do large-scale things. There's another way that biology does it, and that is to simply have an abundance of resources and let some things just die. Kill them off and replace them. The disposable cell version of biology, which is, if you've got enough containers, enough redundant cells, it doesn't matter if you scrape a few off. There's plenty more. If you scratch yourself, you don't bleed usually. You have enough skin left over to do the job. That's the thing that we're seeing now. Back in the 90s, it wasn't very plausible, because we had hundreds of machines and killing a few of them was still a significant impact. Now, when it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of computers, we really are starting to approach biological scales. As these, what today are toys, become actually integrated parts of our lifestyles and technologies—maybe the new homes are built with things with things all over the shop and industrial-strength controllers to manage them. Once that happens, the challenges of managing them and keeping them stable, and keeping them under our control, become paramount. It's a different order of magnitude, again, than we're used to today. This idea of centralized data centers is going to have to break up. We're going to need Cloud substations. In the same way we scale the electrical net, we're going to need to scale the computational net, and storage as well. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS

The O'Reilly Radar Podcast: "In Search of Certainty," Promise Theory, and scaling the computational net.Aneel Lakhani, director of marketing at SignalFx, chats with Mark Burgess, professor emeritus of network and system administration, former founder and CTO of CFEngine, and now an independent technologist and researcher. They talk about the new edition of Burgess' book, In Search of Certainty, Promise Theory and how promises are a kind of service model, and ways of applying promise-oriented thinking to networks.Here are a few highlights from their chat: We tend to separate our narrative about computer science from the narrative of physics and biology and these other sciences. Many of the ideas of course, all of the ideas, that computers are based on originate in these other sciences. I felt it was important to weave computer science into that historical narrative and write the kind of book that I loved to read when I was a teenager, a popular science book explaining ideas, and popularizing some of those ideas, and weaving a story around it to hopefully create a wider understanding. I think one of the things that struck me as I was writing [In Search of Certainty], is it all goes back to scales. This is a very physicist point of view. When you measure the world, when you observe the world, when you characterize it even, you need a sense of something to measure it by. ... I started the book explaining how scales affect the way we describe systems in physics. By scale, I mean the order of magnitude. ... The descriptions of systems are often qualitatively different with these different scales. ... Part of my work over the years has been trying to find out how we could invent the measuring scale for semantics. This is how so-called Promise Theory came about. I think this notion of scale and how we apply it to systems is hugely important. You're always trying to find the balance between the forces of destruction and the forces of repair. There are two ways you can repair a system. One is that you can just wait until it fails and then repair it very fast, and try to maintain an equilibrium like that. We do that when we break a leg or when we do large-scale things. There's another way that biology does it, and that is to simply have an abundance of resources and let some things just die. Kill them off and replace them. The disposable cell version of biology, which is, if you've got enough containers, enough redundant cells, it doesn't matter if you scrape a few off. There's plenty more. If you scratch yourself, you don't bleed usually. You have enough skin left over to do the job. That's the thing that we're seeing now. Back in the 90s, it wasn't very plausible, because we had hundreds of machines and killing a few of them was still a significant impact. Now, when it's tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of computers, we really are starting to approach biological scales. As these, what today are toys, become actually integrated parts of our lifestyles and technologies—maybe the new homes are built with things with things all over the shop and industrial-strength controllers to manage them. Once that happens, the challenges of managing them and keeping them stable, and keeping them under our control, become paramount. It's a different order of magnitude, again, than we're used to today. This idea of centralized data centers is going to have to break up. We're going to need Cloud substations. In the same way we scale the electrical net, we're going to need to scale the computational net, and storage as well. Subscribe to the O'Reilly Radar Podcast: Stitcher, TuneIn, iTunes, SoundCloud, RSS

In this, world of massive cloud-based applications and services, rolling out software has moved from an episodic event to an almost continuous release cycle. In that environment, software products aren't as “done” as they used to be -- they can't be -- so the focus has shifted to reversibility. Building a development organization with the design tools and processes that can aggressively iterate while also creating safety nets. So if things do get screwy they can be fixed before customers even notice. Call it DevOps or application operations, Steven Sinofsky leads a discussion with Karthik Rau from SignalFx and Alex Solomon from PagerDuty about the evolution of I.T. operations – and the requirements and challenges that modern distributed applications pose for a development organization. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

SignalFx CTO Phillip Liu describes his experience building monitoring systems for Facebook, and the more recent SignalFx effort to modernize Cloud Monitoring.

The state of Docker and the container ecosystem was the touchstone for discussion at The New Stack's pancake breakfast hosted by Alex Willams at ContainerCon 2015. Joining Alex were Krishnan Subramanian, Director of OpenShift Strategy at Red Hat, Aneel Lakhani from the marketing team at SignalFx, Erica Windisch, a security engineer at Docker, and Sam Charrington, analyst with The New Stack. Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/WOs9eZOxAJI Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-56-the-pancake-breakfast-circuit-comes-to-containercon/

For this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Alex welcomes back SignalFx founder and CTO Phillip Liu, who is joined this time by Karthik Rau, SignalFx founder and CEO. Also participating is James Turnbull, VP of Engineering at Kickstarter, and co-host Donnie Berkholz of 451 Research. Karthik explains that SignalFx was designed from the ground up to provide better monitoring and visibility for modern distributed applications: "We're seeing new applications being designed as distributed applications, and more microservices architectures, and it's quite common to find applications to have dozens, hundreds, and potentially even thousands of components." Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiGqvNL3gQg Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-45-why-analytics-is-a-core-function-of-monitoring-microservices-architectures/

For this edition of The New Stack Analysts podcast, Alex Williams and returning co-host Donnie Berkholz are joined by Phillip Liu, Founder, CTO, and Engineer at SignalFx, to discuss monitoring the modern distributed application. "It's very easy to create a virtual machine," says Phillip, "and the virtual machine is basically sized for your application, so no longer are you in a world where you have big metal servers and you have many applications running on the same physical server." However, if and when problems arise, it's not as easy to pinpoint the causes as it was ten years ago, when IT teams would triage these issues in-house. Alex wonders, "How is monitoring moving to the center of this new generation of microservices architecture that users are building?" Learn more at: https://thenewstack.io/tns-analysts-show-41-monitoring-and-microservices/

Aaron talks to Karthik Rau (@krrau; Founder/CEO of @SignalFx) about the launch of their advanced monitoring platform, doing streaming analytics for distributed applications, the new role of developers and the mindset of technology-centric business groups. Links: - SignalFx Website - https://signalfx.com/ - SignalFx REST API - https://support.signalfx.com/hc/en-us/articles/201270489 - TheNewStack covers SignalFx launch - http://thenewstack.io/signalfx-a-saas-to-monitor-apps-at-any-scale/ - Ben’s Blog - http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_past_and_future_of_systems_management Music Credit: Nine Inch Nails (nin.com)