SolarWinds Observability – Josh Stageberg, SolarWinds

This is texturung TV. Hey everyone, welcome back to techstrung TV. Our next guest today is Josh stargelberg.

I hope I pronounce the correctly but I'm asking to correct us. Anyway, Josh is with solarwinds and he's actually his first time here on Tech Strunk TV Josh. How are you man?

Welcome. I'm doing really well. Thanks.

Just just for the record in case there's like an AI transcription or something. How do we how do you pronounce your name correctly? I I pronounce it stockaberry or at least that's what I've been told.

Okay. Hey, that's all we can go on Josh staggerberry and and Josh as I mentioned you're with solo winds, but before we jump into solarwinds. Let's hear a little bit about your story.

Sure. Sure, so I have been in software product management for B2B software for a long time started at a small startup in Los Angeles. Over a decade ago called live office.

We sold to Symantec. I spent some time there went through folks places like Veritas and and Dell and Google and servicenow and sort of landed here. I've got the chance here at solarwinds to join a team of folks that I worked with previously at Veritas along with some new faces to really build something exciting which is what we're talking about today.

So that's that's sort of why I came and what I'm excited about now. Very cool. Hey Josh, you know most look our audiences.

It's a tech audience, right and they've heard of solo wins. some of them maybe think they know what solo wins does even some of them don't why don't you before we jump into today's topic? Why don't we give a little solo wins solar winds kind of primer a little background sure solarwinds is a 20 a little over 20 year old company we've had a software that Where the folks were using a long time ago to start monitoring their their networks with like SNMP or IP for IP traffic and we've sort of built from there to deep and wide network monitoring and systems monitoring and management and then over the years have acquire like application performance monitoring tools log management tools.

We've database performance monitoring tuning products, right? So we have sort of a wide portfolio even have a pretty cool itsm product. So we've got like I said sort of a wide portfolio of tools that we've pulled together over many years.

I've bread and butter is really been the network monitoring space for a long time. And so that's probably where you know our name from and we're moving into as a company becoming more of a platform company, but specifically a company that delivers observability Solutions tied to our itsm Solutions, which we think is pretty cool to be able to do like Service management all the way through to the to the item site. So that's if that's not too many acronyms.

I think that's that's sort of us and where we're at. No, not at all. I think it's great.

All right that brings us into what we want to talk about today about a month ago. Solo winds released a new product. in a pretty hot space I don't want to steal your story.

Why not? If you don't mind sharing with the audience. Sure.

I I mentioned one of the main reason that I came to solarwinds was the opportunity to build something that I thought was really cool. What I meant by that is I got the opportunity to work with talented team of Engineers and product managers and Architects and and the folks across the company to put together a entirely new Cloud native software as a service multi-tenant observability solution. So for me like being able to build that solution and the platform that underlines it which will be the platform that allows us to deliver all of our Capabilities all of our features all of our products all of our experiences in a SAS form factor over the coming years is was just very exciting observability itself is a space that I think is still evolving, right?

So observability in this context. This product is called solar winds observability, which I I hope is a pretty pretty straightforward name but observability in this context we think of as pulling together all the different elements of the applications and services that you deliver to your customers. In a way that you can understand what's going on in the application or service quickly understand where there's a problem that you have to address versus where there might be a problem that you can delay.

Understand where the root cause of any issues it is and be able to tie that all back to your user experience for either your services or your applications and do that all in a single parenting glass on a single easy to use fast time to Value yourself platform. But let me let me be a little more specific there. Right?

So the what we're doing is we're we've we've built a platform and we built a product. Solarwinds observability that runs on top of AWS or runs on top of azure, it it allows you to quickly and easily understand everything from digital experience monitoring. To application performance monitoring that's like distributed Trace right to logs things like being able to search for tokens or search for errors, but also be able to live tail number of different log sources in the same place.

Work right? So whether it's your network and your Cloud infrastructure provider or your network in your on-premises or private Cloud environment infrastructure in those places, right when I say Network, I mean things like netflow, right? Infrastructure in those places, right?

So like your wireless access points, right? I all the way down to your databases, right and when I say database, I don't mean like a traditional APM tool can say here's the query that we sent to the database and now throw it over the fence the database people. I mean because of our IP and database we can actually go all the way into the database and understand what's going on in the database itself.

Not that the CPU is high but these are the queries that are blocking this query. This is the last this lack of an index here is causing this to be slow right those that kind of capability. And so so now you go.

Well Josh you just told me about seven different random things that can that are all valuable tools right to help me understand what applications and services are doing but you said it pulls it all together, right and what I'm what I mean by pulling it all together is you can take a uptime check or transaction check or real user monitoring problem, right? Says that there's a problem with your end with your end user experience. We tie that.

In the UI directly to trace that's tied directly to the relevant logs that's tied directly to all the network and infrastructure stuff that's tied all the way back to the database. For you, so you're not manually trying to pull this data together from a bunch of Point Solutions, right? You can see this all in a single pane of glass and you can see a holistic view of exactly what's happening at the time and that is really powerful then if I can go on for just a little bit longer.

No. No, then we add an AIML layer on top of that. Right and everybody says AI Ops and AIML today, but what we mean by that is we are not using our AIML algorithms are Cycles are development to try to pull together in these data.

This data is pulled together by the very architecture of our platform. We're using the AIML to analyze this Rich data sources these rich data sources across all of these spaces simultaneously, right? So we're able to say we're able to say with confidence that the health of this service or application is impacted.

And we can show you that in what we call a health score we're able to say this is anomalous behavior for the system not just anomalous behavior for this device. Right things like that as examples, right? And and then and then lastly as I mentioned we're pulling this together with our itsm portfolio, right so that you can so that you can manage the business side right that like ticketing and the remediation tasks and and the changed log stuff that you're doing on your from from a in your itsm system and directly have that talking to the same back end as all of the as the item stuff the managing your services and applications.

So we think that we think that this has the potential over time to really be a game changer for organizations, especially especially mid-market organizations that struggle to pull all this together that are that need to need to do it all with less. Right as we as we're sort of so often told that but in 2020 to is started becoming such a strong reality for so many companies. So absolutely, you know what I find interesting here.

Josh is really it sounds like what's solarwinds is done is you've taken this observe ability. You are if you will front end. And populated it with all of the great information that solarwinds has been known for him.

Right the kind of stuff that you guys have been monitoring and collecting data on for 20 plus years and now, you know add water and a nice UI and and it's observability where most observability companies that we speak to come out from a little bit. They don't have they don't have solar winds behind them right to gather that info and so they're using open source. Like Prometheus and Telemetry open Telemetry, excuse me, Prometheus, you know some of the other grafana kind of stuff that kind of allows them to suck data out from logs and everything.

So and I said different thing Dad. Yes, so I should point out. I actually believe really strongly and open Telemetry, right?

I think that open Telemetry and the ability to have sort of Open Source collectors, whether they are getting data through instrumenting your application or whether they're getting data like metrics data from devices in your in your network. You know, I I mentioned earlier that I my in my past there was there's companies like Symantec right which we got a lot of feedback for many years about like not another agent, right? I remember those days.

Yeah, and and so so open Telemetry to me is the promise of not another agent right the ability to even if you decide to switch vendors be able to continue to use that same instrumentation collector collection points that you would put together. So we have with solarwinds observability. Not only Do we have the capability to pull in all this data from all these different spaces on this new modern scalable SAS system.

We also fully support open Telemetry. So meaning if you've if you've deployed open Telemetry collectors throughout your environment, we we can accept that data. If you have Prometheus in part of your environment, which is often the case, right we can get data directly.

We can connect data directly from printing videos. If you have service now in your environment, we can natively connect the service now, right and and so we're we are I should I should I should be stronger on my open Telemetry statement. We are open Telemetry native what that means is when we have when we collect data like so for instance, if you have our hybrid Cloud observability product, which is our on-premises or downloaded bits invites software that you can run in your in your environment in your private Cloud.

If you want to send data from that up to our SAS system the connector that we built transmutes that data into open Telemetry before it sent open Telemetry format before it sends it up. Right. So when I say open Telemetry native, I mean our endpoint is open Telemetry and when we collect data from our existing systems, we send it by open Telemetry.

So that's that's right. So it's kind of empowered by these, you know Mega projects that I call them right that we were seeing come out out there. How does this price if you're in if you're already a solarwinds customer is it an add-on is a part of the deal.

What's the story? Yeah, so we're left. So one of the things that we found when we talk to when we talk to customers and Prospects right is there's often a desire to sort of dip your toes into into a solution into an observerability solution, right?

So what do I mean by that? I mean you might want to you might have a lot of infrastructure that you're planning to consult like like monitoring infrastructure that you're planning to consolidate you might have a system that does that you feel pretty good about like pieces of this that you're working on that you that is just not scaling to or not able to address your additional concerns, right? So what we've done in terms of our pricing is if you want to step into solarwinds observability just just with digital experience monitoring.

You can do that. Right and we'll charge you per check. Right and you can if you want to if you want to step in just with log management right log monitoring we can charge you per the amount of data that you sent to us.

Right and if you just want to do database we can charge you for database instance. And then as you want to expand you're able to add just the pieces that you want as you as you understand and want to add more right so it's so it's super easy to do that. And what I would say is like not only do we have and e-commerce portal so you can literally you don't even have to talk to a salesperson and I don't want to talk to a salesperson half the time that I'm going and buying things, right.

com. com. You can check out via e-commerce after that or you can talk to a salesperson on a salespeople are standing by to help out to so, you know, all these different options and like we pride ourselves at solarwinds on this flexibility and this like meet you where you're at.

So that's kind of that's the way we think about it. Love it. All right.

Hey, we're almost at a time. But Josh for people who want to get more information, maybe check it out. com.

But any within the website, where can they go? com there's a product section and you can look at solarwinds observability is listed right there under observability. We'll also have various splashes coming up on the front page again.

There's a there's both a on-premises tool set called or platform called hybrid Cloud observability, which is not the thing we were talking about today but is available there and then there's solarwinds observability, which is also available there which is the thing we're talking about today. So just from a naming perspective. I know I I don't choose names because I would come up with names like solar winds purple things.

Right? And that wouldn't that wouldn't work out so so solarwinds observability got it. Hey, man, I want to thank you for coming on Josh and telling us all about this great new offering from solarwinds.

Why don't we having back on in a little bit and see how things are going? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It would be my pleasure.

All right. We're gonna take a break here on tech struct TV. Go check out solarwinds observability.

This is a you know, we've we've featured some observability Solutions in the past. But this one, you know, it kind of marries the best of that open source world with open Telemetry Prometheus Etc with with you know, the tried and proven solar winds. Back end, so it should be interesting.

We'll take a break. We'll be right back. Stay tuned.

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