Alex Burkardt, Observe | KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2023

This is Textron tv. Hey everyone. We're live back here at CubeCon.

I hope you've been enjoying our coverage today. Mitchell Ashley, our CTO and a GM of Techron Research. And I have been kind of splitting the duties 'cause we're just, we're that booked with people.

There's, I don't know, there's over 10,000 people here. I'm going to guess there's 12 to 15,000 people. Yeah, There's a lot of People at the event.

Maybe more I'll, I'll know more, I'll find out tonight. But anyway, let me introduce you to our next guest. His name is Alex Burkart.

Alex is with Observe Inc. Mm-Hmm. Alex, welcome to Techstrong tv.

Thanks for being here with us at Cucu. Yeah, thanks Alan. I appreciate you guys taking some time to talk to me today.

Absolutely. So let, let's start with this, uh, let's start with Alex. Yeah.

What do you do at Observe? Yeah, So at Observe I run our technical customer facing team. We call it field engineering.

Yep. Uh, and we work with customers from the first interaction when they're in the sales cycle to figure out if observes a great solution for them, all the way to success in renewal and helping them realize value from their investment in our partnership. Okay.

And what did, I mean, so you're at that role, but let's tell a little bit about more your, your personal journey. Oh, yeah. So I started as a computer scientist actually in the Navy.

Really? Uh, yeah. I went to the Naval Academy, got a computer science degree, and they said, that's great, go drive some ships.

So I did, it Touches life in the Navy. What do you expect? And then what?

And then, uh, my journey brought me to Silicon Valley after I did some cybersecurity work for the Navy. And, um, what I love more importantly than anything else is helping people find a way to use technology to solve a problem that makes their life better. Excellent.

Now, when did you come to observe? I've been observed for more than three years now. Yeah.

I was employee 28. I think if my numbers are right. Uh, pre, uh, pre customers, in fact Right.

Really Early that I started, we signed our first customer. Good For them. Good for you.

Good for them. So we don't have to assume, I know for a fact there are people out here who don't know, observe Yeah. From you have never observed, observe, uh, tell them, you know, how would you describe what Observe Yeah.

Is and does to our audience? That's a great question, Alan. So, at Observe, what we realized is observability is a data problem.

So we started by building a data company. What we wanted to figure out is, can we bring a solution to market that allows customers to send any data they'd like to correlate it and interact with it in a way that's, that allows 'em to get more value out of it more quickly. And what we've done is we've brought a solution to market that unifies the observability, uh, tooling into, uh, into one platform that allows you to send logs, metrics, traces, and any other type of data structure to unstructured that you'd like to keep in your observable universe into one tool, one data store.

Love it. And you know, before we jump into news and stuff, for people who want to just say, Hey, I'd like to just, you know, see what their website is. What, what's the URL?

Yeah. com. com.

com. We are Observe inc. Technically.

com makes Sense to me. Yeah. Alright.

We've got all that out of the way out, Alex, let's jump in. Now, you guys recently announced some new, uh, product Yeah. Feature releases.

Why don't we jump in right there and see what's that about? Yeah. Our last release was called Hubble.

And Hubble is significant for a couple of reasons. One, naming after the Telescope Telescope, one of the things that we wanna do is help people elevate their observability. And that came in two specific forms.

Alright, I get it. Yeah. Good.

I just gotta ask, is the next release called Web? We have considered other satellites, and in fact, uh, we had Erica on our launch. Uh, she was actually a na, a NASA scientist.

She really Very Cool. So, all right. One of the, one of the things that we know is very important to our customers is can we, if we bring a solution to market and it's very, very powerful, is it easy to use?

And are we taking advantage of the latest and greatest technology that's been, that's emerging in the market On the ease of use side, one of the things that this Hubble launch, and we did, we call it a launch, uh, included, was the recognition that when we introduced our logs in our metrics and our tracing explorer, we've seen an enormous increase in users engaging in the platform. And we supercharge that by adding one additional layer, which is how we leverage GPT or AI in our platform. And that happens in four specific locations.

We have a chat bot that allows you to get guidance on how to use the tool, will actually allow the AI to write any of our query language for you if you'd like to do that. We call that co-pilot. We also have two cool functionalities in terms of making your data more actionable.

You can right click on a field and observe and ask Ollie or Ollie, GPT specifically to explain what an error means, and it will actually return an answer that helps you stop having to copy and paste into Google and do outside investigations. The last thing that's most, most interesting is we leverage GPT to allow users to separate out their data and do those hard parsing and RegX challenges that no one likes writing Reg Xs. And anyone that Yeah.

com is their friend. And we wanted to kind of bring that into the product and make that easy for customers to use. Very cool.

Yeah. Very cool. Now this was released not here at the show, it was released earlier in the month Yeah.

October 4th. What's been the feedback? Well, we've more than doubled our monthly active users, uh, since we've released that.

Yeah. And Since October 4th. Technically since, uh, since late September.

But yes. Wow. It's, it, it's, it's really simple.

We listen to our customers and we really care about what they see, or sorry, what they say and how they experience ourselves on our platform. And when we say we're focusing on ease of use, we mean it. So, so the entrepreneur in me just has to ask you, Okay, What were you waiting for?

You know, it's very easy to make very quick, bad decisions. It's a lot harder to take a data-driven approach to how to build a product better. And when we approach any problem at observe, and it's, it's built into our culture as we first of all figure out this is an important problem.

How can I measure the impact I can make on this problem? And that's how we took, that's how we measured usability. Now for ai.

We kind of knew that it was gonna be something special and could, and it could help. We're still figuring out exactly how to measure the impact there. But every decision we make at observe is grounded in what's best for our customers and how do we help make the market better.

So how much, how much of this phenomenal growth in such a short period of time do you think is just attributable to kind of riding the AI wave, if you will? That increase in active user growth actually wasn't, wasn't tied to the AI release. It was more to the ease of use functionality that we brought.

And I think that's, that's important for any product. But more specifically, one is as powerful as ours. When you're solving big data problems, people get exposed to big data.

And one of the things we thought very deeply about is how do we take the experience that a user has to have to get to the outcome they want, and narrow that down and give them an obvious path to go through so that they don't have to deal with all of the problems if they just wanna come in and check their logs and see what's not working. You know, sometimes it's the simplest question of, Hey, is it easy to do this in the tool? And when we decided ourselves that it wasn't easy enough, then we started making some really serious changes.

And that was backed by every single one of our customers, uh, agreeing with us back in the active user growth. Sure. That's fine.

That's phenomenal, man. Alex, I can't, I It's, look for those out here. This damn impressive.

Um, let's talk a little bit about con here now. Yeah. What, what, I mean, it's only day one of the, of the expo floor open and everything.

What are you, what are you hearing from the crowd, from the attendees? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, this is my second cube con.

I was new to it last year when we went, when we were in Detroit. And I really love this conference, Alan. Yeah, It's great.

It's a great community. It's a great community. It's a great conference.

And frankly, when people come up to our booth and wanna talk to us, they wanna talk about what we do. Yep. There's not a lot of tire kickers.

Everyone that's here seems to be operators, people that are experienced and, and steepen the problem. And I love whenever someone comes up and talks to us. I think the other thing I've seen in this, in this particular, uh, venue specifically, the room is packed.

It's crowded, so crowded that I think that we're gonna have to have a bigger, a bigger footprint next year. Observers or the whole Both. Yeah.

Well the problem is there's a pretty big convention center. Yeah. I mean, short of breaking into sort of a two different exhibit halls.

Yeah. Which I've, IRSA used to do that now. It's one big continuous one.

Um, it's hard. The the other thing I will tell you, so we do the North American and the European. Yeah.

So in, in Amsterdam in the spring, they actually said, look, I think it was 12,000 was the number Mm-Hmm. At 12,000 they stopped selling tickets. They did a waiting list and a lot of people didn't get to the show.

They were on the waiting list. I would not, I mean, as, as anti-business as that sounds, I wouldn't be surprised if they did something similar. Yeah, that makes sense.

I mean, the quality of conversations and the quality of attendee Right. Keep the quality is super high. And you, and you asked about some of the conversations we're having when people come by.

It's a variety of things and, and a couple of themes that I see. I'm curious if, if other, you know, people that have come on the show have said the same, but people are, are continue to talk to us about saving money, they wanna do more with less. Nope.

Yep. No one has me over The last few years with budgets. That's big.

Yep. And I think they also want to figure out, do we, do we need all of the tools? Is there a way we can both, you know, get some hard dollar savings and some soft dollar savings by compressing some tooling and aligning teams?

We're also seeing a lot of push. And then the DevOps teams are getting more involved in security conversations as well. Which I, I, I, I guess No, no.

That we, there's no doubt. Yeah. For, as a former security practitioner, if you had asked me five years ago if I thought these two markets would converge, I would not have said yes.

Now I think it's inevitable. I think it's already happened. Yeah.

Right. I, so here, there's a lot of convergence going on. There's security with DevOps into what we call DevSecOps.

MM-Hmm. Yep. But there's also, there was a time, and I've been going to these conferences now for, before covid, so I don't know, four or five years.

Yeah. There was a time where cloud native was very developer-centric. Yes.

Not as much centric, but it was very distinct from DevOps. Yes. There was DevOps and there was cloud native and then there was security.

So you look at a company like ours, right? Yeah. com.

Yep. Cloud native now, security B Boulevard. Yeah.

What, and I always knew there was an inherent, um, overlap between them, but we've seen much more than an overlap. Now we've seen a, a conversion Yes. Around this with security being a primary concern of people.

And you really, you don't do cloud native today without doing DevOps. Agreed. And everything getting pushed out today.

Especially Greenfield, not Brownfield stuff. It's predominantly, you know, probably 85% or better cloud native. Yeah.

I think that's, that's another thing I've seen too, as well. Many, many customers are adopting the cloud native terminology, setting goals in those, in those languages and words Now, multi-threaded. Yes, no doubt.

You know, container based, the whole cloud native thing. And now what I think we're starting to see, and we see, look, you're naming your company's observed Yeah. Is it's not just the architecture and development being cloud native, but the cloud native aspect of the operations Yes.

Of ops. Forget dev, forget dev Ops. Ops.

It even touches revenue. So one of the things that we see very often is do the nature of how our platform can process data. We take, you know, technical telemetry from a customer's application.

We also take business data. So sometimes customers ask us, how can you observe, help us give our customers a better experience? Well, one of the ways is we can tell you when a particular customer's hurting, when a customer has a challenge or help you reframe all these very deep technical, you know, jargon and things that are happening into the context of how does this impact the customer's experience?

Am I able to get proactive? Am I am, is what I'm doing in my infrastructure plan having a net positive impact on my customers, on my users? Sure.

And those are questions that previously companies, I don't think they could, they thought they could answer. And when they start working with us, they start seeing a path to that. And I love that.

I, we have some customers even completely away from the DevOps side, that send us shipping data just 'cause they want to know, can I make a support dashboard for my, for my low level support employees so that they can be more efficient with their time and our data. Yeah. It's such a cool convergence.

I agree with you. I love that word convergence. It is, it it really is.

You know, let's talk a little bit about observability though too. So over the last two years, so there was a cucu in LA during around Covid time that was Mm-Hmm. A little dicey.

Then there was, uh, the one in Europe then got canceled. Then there was Detroit, then Amsterdam here. Mm-Hmm.

We've really seen the observability market just explode. Right? Yeah.

Um, Prometheus, uh, what, what's the other, I'm drawing a blank. The other big observability. Open source.

Open Telemetry. Open Telemetry. Yes.

Everyone, I think of the second and third biggest projects of the gazillion projects in CNCF now. Right. That's Such a good point.

Remember when Open Telemetry was, you know, open tracing and, and it was, yeah. It was still kinda a fractured project. If you asked us three years ago if we thought that Open Telemetry would be the way, we weren't super sure a year into that.

So two years ago we were like, yeah, this is Is a Direction. It's, it's Solid. This is no doubt about it.

It is a, you know, you look and you can't see this at home guys 'cause all you're seeing is here. Yeah. But there's a big, all our beautiful faces big floor out there.

Yeah. But so much of it is based now on, on this. So Yeah.

Really good stuff. Really Good stuff. I think the other thing, observability as a, as a vernacular is kind of emerging even at the higher level in the business.

You know, by definition observability is, can I tell something about a system by looking at its outputs? And one of the things as we're moving closer to Cloud native is more and more systems have outputs and that, you know, kind of builds on that data problem I mentioned and why we were founded. So agreed.

I look forward to seeing how this problem space changes in the next year. Oh, I, I think we're just, look, when you start, what you guys are already doing it with Gen AI and stuff. Yeah.

You start adding gen ai, gen AI to this stuff, we start putting more focus on it. It's gonna be an interesting, it's an we're in for an interesting times. That may What's the Irish proverb?

May you live in interesting times. Yes, definitely interesting times. I prefer, anyway, Alex, thanks for joining us here.

Yeah. Live at CubeCon. This is Observe Inc.

com. Check it out. Hey, they're doing amazing things.

This new release, something that gets twice as many new visitors, right? Yeah. In, in a couple of weeks.

A month. It's gotta doing something right? Yeah.

Alright, we're gonna take a break. We're live at CubeCon in Chicago. We, I think we have one or two more videos before we wrap for today.

We'll be right back.