Integration with Atlassian’s Opsgenie – Aaron Lober, Blameless

This is texturing TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to Tech strong TV. I am happy to have well, it's the first time he's been on our show.

Let me introduce you to Aaron lober. Aaron is with blameless and you may or may not know blameless. He's gonna tell us about him.

Hey Aaron, welcome to Tech strong TV. Hi Alan. Thank you so much for having me.

I I pleasure man. Yes, super happy to be here. Hey before we jump into blameless.

Give us a little of the Aaron lober story. Gosh, the air and lobster story where to begin, you know, I should give my mother's phone number. She can give you all.

Yeah, I'm sure she would give us the story. No I so I've been with blameless for about seven months now, but I started my career in in technology and then product management space weaved my way in and out of of different verticals if you will, but you know spent the last five years in construction management and really happy to have found my way here, you know, this this group of people this customer set in particular I think has challenges that really resonate with me. So it's really exciting to be able to meet folks, you know practitioners in this space and help tell their stories.

So like I said, I'm happy to be here. Very cool man. All right.

Let's talk a little bit about blameless. I I've been familiar with blame. It's blameless for a while, but not everyone in the audience is so if you don't mind Aaron, let's do a little kind of level set.

What what's blameless about? Yeah, absolutely. Well so blameless, you know, we really consider ourselves to be a reliability solution first.

So we were you know, we were really incepted with the idea that we could build a tool to help engineering devops or Sr. 18 teams, ultimately build and operate more effective reliable products for their customers and our entree into that if you will was really focusing on Incident Management, very pointedly. So what we've built is a essentially an incident management workflow engine that you know, our customers can operate within their chat bot of choice.

It's really going to help them automate. Call it the most toilsum aspects of their workflow. So, you know incident communication you controlling the flow of information capturing every detail.

These are things that you know, really take time and they they force and apply pressure on practitioners when things break. So we blameless have really automated as much of that as as we possibly can in those early moments of incident response and then provide a guard rails to the rest. So that's really the game as we've grown as we've expanded the platform.

We've also started to add more features that are what I would consider to be slightly more proactive reliability management. And so tools like slis tools for incident learning. So really robust retrospective templates.

Our tool that we like to refer to as reliability insights is Incident analytics engine and then of course, all of this is fairly broadly connected across the rest of the engineering Tech stack because of course as you know, Alan, you know a tool like this can't exist in a vacuum. It has to touch the observability tools your team uses. It has to integrate into your engineering project management systems.

So that's that's what we built. That's that's us at high level. Yeah.

I mean it also I think integrate into the communication Right, so things like slack Integrations and emails and and so forth, right? You know, how does the team stay involved with all of it? And you know, look, I've always loved the name.

com 2013 2014 and and one of the my favorite aspects of develops was sort of the blameless post mortem, right because I think one of the I I still believe that culture is an important part of devops, right? It's not just the tools. Oh, yeah, I don't care what you say and and one of the important aspects I think of a healthy devops culture is if you can't Take a cold hard look at your processes and and and you know, what goes on in a blameless sort of environment where people are unafraid to say man.

We screwed that up. I could have done better. Right or here's what I would have done differently.

Right without the repercussions. If you will, right? That's one of the beautiful things about devops.

It's about that continuous Improvement is not being afraid to admit that was a mistake or that was wrong or we could have done better or here's what we should be doing, you know and And so when you know, that's when I loved I loved the name from the get-go of blame was because I think any capsulates that right there's about incident response. I'm not here to shoot anyone. I'm here to make it better and and That's a worthy thing to do.

So, yeah, no you have. Something to say only god. Well just that.

Yeah, I mean SRE and devops are in our DNA. I mean, that's why blameless is her namesake. I think a lot about the the marketing recent quote software is hard, you know building software is hard we creating complex systems and we're relying on hundreds.

If not thousands of people to do it. So yeah, these are these are really sociotechnical problems. Like I love I love what you said, right?

It's not just about the tooling. This is where where people intersect technology and those complex systems are going to break in novel and unique ways and having a blameless approach to maintaining them to Growing them is a great way to go about it, right? Because if you can't do that, if you can't cultivate that type of culture things get hidden and and then ultimately the system fails right things get swept under the rug and sooner or later, you know, that becomes technical debt.

And sooner or later someone pays the piper for it. anyway It's a great discussion here. But let's let's shift gears a little bit if we can Aaron and you guys recently hadn't announcement around a new integration.

Why don't I don't want to steal your thunder. Why don't you tell our audience? Thank you for that.

Yeah, we are very excited to announce an integration into Ops Genie. So I'm sure most of the audience is gonna be familiar with Ops Genie. They are at least the second largest player in the you know, alerting space.

So there are well beloved tool for on-call management for us blameless. As I said before part of our strategy is to be very broadly integrated across the rest of the engineering toolstack. And if you think about Incident Management as a workflow if you want to visualize it that way that workflow often starts when something is identified to be broken and as soon as that happens the right group of All need to be alerted and brought together in some fashion in order to resolve the incident and this is really the value of the interconnection between blameless and Ops Genie.

So Most most companies who are really utilizing tools like Ops Genie or pager duty to their fullest extent have a defined escalation protocol set up within within the tool. So we in planless leverage that to when an incident is declared make sure that we are automatically recruiting all of the you know, most sought after domain experts in the company into the right incident channel. So that's really the first thing it's fast recruitment.

I I'm not a huge fan of talking so much about MTT metrics, you know, I think I've been well schooled by my my teammates and the folks the industry I've spoke with about how those can be it can be a mistake to hang your hat on those alone. But when we're talking about, you know time to respond Gathering the team early assembly is a huge part of that the longer that takes the longer it takes for actual. incident like the novel aspects of incident response to get underway so we can take what could be a You know minutes hour long process and we can cut it down to nearly instantaneous another big value there really for practitioners is of course answering the question fast, like who who do I call you know, somebody's gonna get paid but depending on how your team's architected they may not be in fact the domain expert.

So we also we're trying to eliminate ambiguity. In that early moment because ambiguity causes stress stress causes burnout. So this is really at the core of the integration there.

The last thing to say about it technically is, you know for us in terms of the value blameless provides. A healthy portion of that is in our ability to collect and organize data both in a retrospective timeline. So your team doesn't have to do that manually, but also within our data models you can query it after the fact using an incident Analytics tool right?

You want to learn you want to know which teams are most impacted by recurring events. You want to know where which microservice maybe the group was taking longer to respond. There are important data points in here you can use to drive accountability or set standards across your organization.

So we also enable that by pulling certain data points from opportunity onto our incident timeline. We really facilitate the the practitioner whether really whether it's an Incident Commander or it's you know, an SRE who's thinking or I should say devops lead who's thinking more pointedly about the human system itself and and the standards within the company for on Call. Um, it really gives them sort of what they the information they need in one place.

So that's really the technical integration. I'm they're interesting things to say about why that's also significant from a from a business perspective. You know, what what that does for for us in terms of reaching a broader Market or I guess the role that interconnected Technologies play in this devops SRE engineering tool ecosystem.

But those those are all Deep dive conversations in and of their own absolutely they are and their conversations frankly we have here because that's our audience right? These are as we want to understand that solos and so forth. I think an important part of this also though.

Aaron is look I first became aware of Ops genie before the atlassian. Actually, you know at last they became part of it last year. I used to see them in all the devops days events and they they were they were hardcore devops people right?

They were hardcore. I mean look, there are there are other incident responses, right? There was pager Duty obviously is a probably the leading one you mentioned.

The second biggest is Ops Genie. There was another one alert law not Alert Logic, excuse me, they were out of Boulder and they got purchase or required by Splunk and I've gone if I remember them right this second, but But another you know, they were another one. Ops Genie that was really hardcore devops and and I think that's why they really appealed to atlassian which is in and of itself.

you know pretty successful company with within devops, but within this much bigger space as well, but the nice thing about the atlassian portfolio is you know, when you look at your and Ops Genie and and Trello and and you know, some of the other great Best in Class tools that they offer right something they all have in common. Is this great echo system. of leading vendors who integrate with them because that's what makes the atlassian tools.

I think Best in Class is they really make it easy for companies? Like blameless to plug in here leverage this great atlassian presence in the marketplace as well as some medicine class tools, but add your own special sauce to it. Tell your own story, right you already using obstini already using jira or one of these other tools.

That's great. Here's how blameless gives you a leg up. Over, you know, just using that tool and they're really they're really good about it.

I there there's such a great business. I really am a fan and you're right. They've made it they've made it very very fluid very easy for us to be an integration partner in and we really what you're describing this, you know, make life easy for folks is also something really key to our our culture our DNA what we're trying to do, you know, we're trying to make Incident Management easier that really bottom line.

So I mentioned earlier that sort of workflow the golden pathway that starts, you know, when when an alert pops off, but you can think of our connections into atlassian in different points as intersecting multiple times along that workflow. I mean, there's there's Ops Genie right and that integration but once the teams assembled and they're doing the work of responding to and resolving an incident in you know, in blameless or I should say in there really Fleet in their chat app of choice whether that's slack or Microsoft teams, of course using blameless is the engine to power it but once that's done and they're working on their retrospectives and they have follow-up actions. Those can also those are also integrated directly into jira.

So we also are connected to atlassian on the other end of that conversation. So once you have a completed retrospective, you can you can store that or push that really easily into the system that you're engineering team uses to manage its projects which is usually valuable right like they're there are no manual. There's no manual data entry here because no one no true practitioner has time for that.

No, you're right. You're right. You only have a little bit of time left Aaron this integration is available now.

It is yes, so it's available now also, I would be remiss if I didn't say that we also have a free trial of blameless available on the website. com/trial you can get access to the Ops Genie integration slack Microsoft teams, truthfully the entire collection of our integration database. We've got over 30 in there now, so if you're interested in coming and playing with the tool, I hope you'll come check us out.

I love it. Hey, man, I told you the time goes quick we're over 15 minutes, but I want to appreciate it. I told you I goes appreciate you coming on and keeping us posted here.

Come back. He we don't hear enough about blameless. So let's let's make sure you stay in touch with us.

Okay, man. Oh, I'll I'll come anytime you'll have me. Well, you've got an invitation.

Thank you. Alan everybody. All right.

Thank you. Aaron Lauber right lover yes over. I'm rich pronounce apologize Aaron lover here from blameless on texture on TV.

We're gonna take a break and we will be right back.