Guest: Kit Merker (LinkedIn)
Company: Nobl9 (Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR: Newsroom, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Nobl9 Chief Growth Officer Kit Merker to talk about the Service Level Analyzer, the newest capability of Nobl9’s observability platform.

Key highlights of this video interview:

• Service Level Analyzer helps companies set reasonable objectives for reliability and performance across their service using historical data from real incidents such as error budgets, service level objective (SLO) violations, what has been alerted, etc. It can perform quick “what-if” analysis to test out the impact of different targets and thresholds so users can tune the SLO much faster.
• Service level objectives are basically reliability or performance targets. For many services, it’s incredibly expensive to try to hit 99.999% –  99.9% or 99.5% is more reasonable in a lot of cases.
• While companies are struggling to maintain and earn trust with their customers, there have been a number of reliability outages in the news. Reliability engineering is an important part of delivering service.
• Over the last few years, observability and infrastructure have evolved, with a lot more players and open-source investment.
• In early 2023, the major challenges facing enterprises include keeping up with the competition in terms of innovation, increased complexity, less staff and resources to do what needs to be done, and reliability had to be engineered into their processes to avoid embarrassing outages. All these have spurred an incredible demand for observability tools and cloud solutions.
• Large organizations have a set of shared services and shared capabilities that they rely on. They all need cloud, they all need databases, they all need identity, they all need metrics and observability. People are increasingly trying to productize that into a platform. Since every enterprise and every company has slightly different platform needs, they might be able to get everything out of the box. They may have to stitch together multiple solutions, certain configuration, certain policy, and that becomes the platform within an organization.
• Nobl9 is currently available in three versions: 1) Free, includes 20 SLOs and it works with all data sources; 2) Teams edition, which can be purchased on Amazon Marketplace; and 3) Enterprise edition.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.