Guest: Kit Merker (LinkedIn)
Company: Nobl9 (Twitter)
Show: Let’s Talk @ SLOconf 2023

Nobl9 recently hosted SLOconf 2023, an event that delved into the world of service level objectives (SLOs) helping people get started as well as focusing on key topics for those further along in their SLO journey. In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya catches up with Kit Merker, Chief Growth Officer at Nobl9, to discuss the key trends from SLOconf 2023 and how far along organizations are in their SLO journey. Merker talks about what the future holds for SLOs and where Nobl9’s key focuses currently lie. 

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• This is the third year Nobl9 has run SLOconf 2023, a virtual event with key speakers from Ford Motor Company and Capital One. This year, they also added in-person SLO Bootcamps and local events around the world, which have proved successful. Merker discusses the recent events and the trends he is seeing in organizations adopting SLOs. 
• Merker talks about the highlights from the SLOconf such as going through some notable analyst reports like The State of Service Level Objectives 2023, and their latest product enhancement announcements such as a query checker, a metrics health notifier, the new Nobl9 Delivery Network, and their SLO GPT project. 
• According to the State of SLO 2023 Survey, 80% of respondents said they had increased their focus on reliability due to the pandemic. Merker discusses the trends and findings they are seeing in this year’s report compared to previous years. 
• Google played a pivotal role in advocating for SLOs as part of the SRE methodology, but Merker feels like this is part of a larger change. He talks about how Nobl9 has taken Google’s idea and extended it beyond just distributed systems. 
• Merker discusses the level of awareness they are seeing now with people on their SLO journey and how many are now well beyond the first stages of adopting and integrating SLOs into the organization and are looking to automate or scale them. 
• Silencing alerts is a key benefit of using Nobl9’s systems, reducing noisy alerts by 92%, according to Enterprise Strategy Group. Merker talks about the impact this has on engineering teams and how this frees up time for them to focus on other things. 
• Merker talks about what the future holds for SLOs, saying that he feels out-of-the-box solutions, that are open source and publically available, are the future. Nobl9 wants to enable engineers to focus on running reliable services rather than spending a lot of time on the plumbing to measure and manage the metrics pipelines for the reliable services.
• Nobl9 has built its core platform but now its focus lies on how to make it incredibly easy and how it can give people instant business value, making engineers more productive so they can focus on shipping new capabilities. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.