Monitoring systems allows companies to become more agile and avoid disasters, says SignalFx chief marketing officer Tom Butta.
SignalFx offers聽cloud monitoring tools to help customers make sense of this new world by providing observability, alerting and triage and troubleshooting.
鈥淚f a plane were to crash everyone wants to go to the black box and find out the cause but unfortunately the plane has already crashed,鈥� he told 老九品茶Cloud.
鈥淲ouldn鈥檛 it be great if you had extreme visibility into things happening as the plane is flying so you can instrument change on the fly to avoid problems as they happen?
鈥淭he world we鈥檙e operating in is in real time and until recently tech hadn鈥檛 caught up 鈥� well, now it has.鈥�
老九品茶es must use the tech to bring their systems together and save money in a changing world, says the company鈥檚 CTO Arijit Mukherji.
A former聽engineering manager at Facebook, Mukherji believes that the movement towards micro services and the cloud adds complexity to businesses as environments become more diverse with more teams to manage.
鈥淚t gives you an overall view of things,鈥� he said.
鈥淪ometimes, especially when it鈥檚 a large company and you have various different teams, it鈥檚 becoming increasingly difficult to have an overview of where you鈥檙e at.
鈥淟arge centralised systems where you can send things from all your different services are invaluable.
鈥淲e had a customer called Acquia, which is a major SaaS company on the east coast of America. They deployed us and found they had a million dollars in infrastructure spend that was rarely being used.
鈥淭hey were able to remove it but the fact it took us to go and find it sort of explains the problem.
鈥淚t鈥檚 all a little bit chaotic right now and a tool like SignalFx, especially one that scales and lets you look at different aspects of your system in one place, brings a level of visibility that鈥檚 difficult to get otherwise.鈥�
Mukherji worked at Facebook a decade ago when the social media platform was undergoing聽a digital transformation.
He has taken lessons from the tech giant and built SignalFx to help the other companies out there that may not have the time or resources of a major corporation.
鈥淔acebook was going through explosive growth ten years ago and their motto is move fast and break things,鈥� he said.
鈥淭he way you do that is to empower developers with certain types of services and monitoring and say 鈥榞o and be productive鈥�.鈥�
However, the key to keeping up with the competition as cloud technology continues to flourish is to ensure the rest of the business can keep up.
鈥淵ou can鈥檛 just deploy cloud and keep everything else the same 鈥� retooling the business is a requirement because the pace of innovation is really accelerating and those not able to keep up are falling by the wayside,鈥� he said.
鈥淏lockbuster wasn鈥檛 able to perceive what was coming with Netflix and move fast enough.鈥�
The other thing Mukherji often sees when companies deploy a monitoring tool like SignalFx is that they start having centres of excellence within their business.
鈥淭hey have a team that says that monitoring is important and starts to promote best practice within the organisation,鈥� he said.
鈥淭hat team owns the relationship with us and internally becomes the face of monitoring.
鈥淭hey say 鈥榟aving seen the benefits and power of the tool we know where we want to be and we will educate different teams to get on with the programme and understand what they have at their fingertips鈥�.鈥�
Regardless of business size, it鈥檚 vital to make sure that companies have the right tools for the job that are best of breed and tailored to the company鈥檚 needs.
鈥淭he system should be scalable, it should be timely and there should be a way to look at everything holistically,鈥� said Mukherji.
鈥淵ou don鈥檛 have to have everything on day one but you do need to have a clear strategy around where you want to go because our view is good quality monitoring is an enabler for a business rather than a cost centre.鈥�