2022 Observability Forecaset Report – Peter Pezaris, New Relic

This is Textron TV. Hey everyone, welcome to another techstrung TV segment. I am happy to be joined by Peter pizares of New Relic here on techstroke TV.

It's always great having our friends at New Valley gone. Hey, Peter, welcome to Tech strong TV. Thanks very much for having me.

All right. So Peter before we even get started, is that a keyboard I see behind you it is. I like to dabble on the piano.

I wish I had time to play it more. I've been a struggling aspiring musician my entire life, but are you Aren't we all but look, we're not gonna put you on the spot and make you play anything today. But why beyond the being a struggling keyboard?

That's why don't you give us a little bit of your background and maybe you know, what for those out here who are not as familiar with New Relic is maybe I am a little background on the company as well. Sure. Let me start with the company New Relic is a leader in observability.

And our goal is to help every engineer do their best work using data not opinions and everything they do so every stage of their software development life cycle. And the way that we do that is by servicing production Telemetry in different experiences. So you can see how your systems are performing and take that important data and act on it using data driven decisions.

I joined the company a little over a year ago through an acquisition of my company called code stream and in my history. I've sort of been a Serial entrepreneur so prior to code stream. I had three other companies that I founded built and sold.

Actually, yeah, I have a similar background myself, you know Peter. com one of the flagship Brands here at Tech strong for eight years now and New Relic was a A player when we started, you know back then we didn't call it observability. We had names like APM and stuff like that and it's been a player all along and as as the technology has changed and things have changed.

We've seen a change. that being said you know, they've certainly kept up with the whole observability movement, which is kind of changed that whole whether you called it AI Ops or 8pm as I mentioned or what have you it's really the seems the industry is geld around observability now is as the thing here, let's talk a little bit about Where you guys see this? coming from Yeah, well.

There's a lot of change right in calling out that there's been a lot of change in the industry. Whether it's the terms we're using to describe it or the scope of what observability is today. And in order to understand that change and really what customers are doing today.

We are releasing a report which is the largest report research report of any of its kind like it's it's we surveyed 1600 technology Professionals in 2022. and about two-thirds of those were practitioners or developers and engineers and about 1/3 of those were c-suite Executives and non-executive managers because we wanted to more deeply understand not only how people are using observability Solutions today, but what they expect to get out of observability in the future, Absolutely, you know I just again my observation you're much more dialed into this than I am is what really has empowered a lot of the observability. Evolution has been open source.

tools open source projects that have allowed us to really start You know in order to do observability, right? Inherently, you have to have a lot of data I think and then you have to have actionable Intelligence on that data when we look at things, you know around Telemetry and and Prometheus and stuff like that. You know, it's really empowered a lot of this observability Market to take shape.

Yeah, that's for sure and one of the things that we're finding through this research report. Is that as those it environments become more complex, you know you cited that open source has been an enabler of being able to give you more visibility and capture more data. But what we're finding is that as systems become more complex our customers or or the industry at large are experiencing tool fragmentation.

And so they're collecting different types of data from different parts of their systems and sending it to different backends. And what they found was that there's an incredible fragmentation of not only where the data lives and these siled experiences but also from different job functions within your organization. So you've got your devops engineer who may be looking at one system and an application engineer who's looking at a different system and a network engineer looking at a third system and because of those siled experiences when there is an outage or when there is a customer-facing problem finding the root cause of really what's going on tends to also be a fragmented experiences and so as a result of that we found in the survey that A terrifying number of of organizations have outages more than once a week.

So half of the respondents say that they have an outage. More than once a week in production and you know that we can all agree that that's that's far too much. Yeah, that really is.

You know you referenced this report and study. Why don't we kind of formally? Introduce it to the audience if you don't mind.

yeah, I'd be happy to so we Last year, we was the first time we conducted such a survey and this year and we got so much value out of it and we published it. So this year we decided to really double down and invest more deeply in not only the the number of questions that we asked industry participants were responses. But also in the scope of of the survey itself we had over 1600.

Technology professionals respond to the survey and we've just released the full report which is 80 pages long and chock-full of all kinds of extraordinarily interesting information and and one key thing about the way that we're releasing is that we've open source the underlying data. So while we've generated a number of very interesting insights, we're also opening up to the world. So anybody can dig into the data deeply and find their own insights.

Absolutely. What do you I mean you gave us some insights into the report but I always find when I look at these reports Peter that there's usually like three big takeaways right three things that you really can wrap. Your you had around one.

You mentioned was the fragmentation. Yep, right? Can you give us maybe two others that you sure so what is just sort of the bullishness towards observability?

We found that the majority of respondents. Indicated that they would have 90% So we Define seven different observability capabilities. Okay, and you mentioned earlier it used to be called APM and but now we have logs we've got network monitoring but all kinds of different aspects to observability.

So we Define 17 of them when we asked the survey respondents. How many of these 17 observability capabilities they expect to be deployed by 2025? And over half of them said that they'd have 90% of those capabilities deployed by 2025.

That's a that's a staggering number. If you think about how how much that means compared to where we are today because only 3% of the survey respondents said that they had all 17 capabilities to play today. So if 3% are doing it today and over half say that 90 plus percent will be deployed by 2025.

That means that there's a lot of interest and deploying observability within Enterprises. So that was the one that really jumped out at me, but the other that's kind of related is that I think one of the drivers of that is that observability has become a board level imperative with 73% of the c-suite executives responding say that they're Advocates of observability. And the one the of those 78% said that observability was a key enabler for achieving their core business goals.

So it's not just that observability is within the engineering department and and there are some people who are responsible for uptime or you know interested and sort of really Solutions but it really is up and down the orchard for Enterprise companies including all the way up to the c-suite. You know, I I often wonder too. You know the rising tide lifts all boats.

and cyber, security has become such a You know not it's not a nice to have it's a must have it's a top priority all the way up to the board level. Let alone the seat sweets and I think A good chunk of observability or a good portion of observability is for right or wrong tied into cyber. I wonder what effect that that's having on raising observabilities.

Profile to the c-suite as well. Absolutely, you know, we're definitely seeing a shift in the way that customers are thinking about security and the way that they're thinking about observability and we're seeing increasingly that are observability vendors are offering security is baked in to the solution. So as you adopt and observability provider, it comes with security built in we announced in fact this last May at our future stack customer conference that we have a security product that will be launching in the coming quarters.

Fantastic. So Peter, I guess, you know tying a bow around this stuff for our audience out here. What does it mean for them over the next?

six months a year Right, you know, what are these findings sort of where they leaning us to? I think observability is no longer an option where you can decide whether you know, should you have a mature observability practice or not? I think that data including in the survey has become very very clear.

You know, the another number that really jumps out of the report is that we Define something called a mature observability practice. So that means you've deployed all the different capabilities of observability and you do things like proactive detection rather than reactive detection. So of those respondents that had what we defined as a mature observably practice 100% of them 100% every single one of them said that observably improves Revenue retention.

Because they more deeply understand customer behaviors. And that so in addition to reducing the number of outages the customer impacting outages observability can help you understand how your customers are using your products and you can not only improve your Revenue retention but also revenues by adopting observability. So that's that I think is a key finding is that it's no longer optional.

It's becoming a best practice and I think customers of all sizes are starting to realize the value of observatively. Absolutely. I I don't doubt that for a second Peter for people out here.

Maybe who want to dig in? to the report if you have like an easy to remember URL that they could go to otherwise we'll if it's one of the long ones. We'll try to put it in the notes sure.

com. We've got to promote it on our hope and just go from there. Yeah, excellent.

Anything else happening in New Relic on the news from Peter that you're allowed to share with us? Well, of course, there's there's many things happening. What were what I'm particularly excited about within my department.

So as we covered in the opening of the segment part of my responsibility at New Relic is the customer experience and we got a lot of feedback from our customers that new relics a great powerful tool but they'd love to see it be made easier to use and so we're just a few short weeks away from launching a brand new overall New Relic experience where I think customers delighted at how much easier we've made it to use for more product perspective. So I'm particularly excited about that coming soon. Well, we're gonna have to have you on to show us that how great I'd love to absolutely.

Well, just a warning we're gonna be on the road a whole bunch coming up. We've got devops world and the coupon and a bunch of other, you know, we're starting to go back traveling again, and I'm looking forward to that as well. But we always have time for new Alec and you to come on.

Well, we'll schedule some time for that Peter. I want to thank you for coming on and sharing with us the results of this report kind of your outlook on observability. Come back.

Keep us posted and continued success over at New Relic man. I will and thank you very much for having me. There's a it always a delight to chat and I'd love to be back anytime you'd welcome.

You have an open invitation just have your people talk to my people. Alrighty. All right, great.

Thank you rally here on techstar TV. Go check out their report. com and check it out.

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