IT Ops Query

Kishore Gopalakrishna says that the observability market is ripe for disruption in the AI age, particularly at the storage and query layer. The former LinkedIn architect is now co-founder and CEO of StarTree, which offers a real time analytics platform based on Apache Pinot. The company has a preview version of its StarTree Cloud service for observability that supports metrics, logs and traces, and shipped StarTree ThirdEye last ye...

Mark Tomlinson is senior director of performance and observability for digital payments provider FreedomPay. He previously worked for PayPal and also served as Chief Performacologist, founder and host of the PerfBytes podcast from 2012 to 2023. He talks about how his company uses generative AI tools in its observability practices, imagines the future possibilities for agentic AI ... and just as importantly, explains what a "Perform...

Alois Reitbauer is chief technology strategist, head of open source and the leader of research at observability vendor Dynatrace. He is a contributor to CNCF open source standards such as the Keptn event-driven orchestration project and OpenFeature for feature flag management. His Dynatrace bio also describes him as "a regular conference speaker, blogger, book author and sushi maniac." He reflects on the evolution of AIOps before a...

The rise of generative and agentic AI is also OpenTelemetry's moment to shine – in an increasingly non-deterministic world, there's a lot to be said for a standard means of collecting telemetry data about system behavior. However, it can be difficult to get a consensus on everything, especially developers' preferences about instrumenting code.

This week's guest, Austin Parker, was among the original founding members of the OpenTele...

What if you could see your application and infrastructure represented spatially instead of two-dimensional dashboard tabs, similar to atoms in a molecule or stars in the sky? According to Matt Young, founder and co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technical advisory group (TAG) on observability, this will soon be a reality thanks to advanced AI models, knowledge graphs, and emerging data storage techniques such...

Charity Majors pioneered the term 'observability' as co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, based on her experience building and managing distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of the O'Reilly books Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. Her Honeycomb bio adds that she "loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch."

In this interview with In...

Multifaceted connection points are emerging between observability and AI, from monitoring and improving AI models themselves to observing the ways the behavior of AI agents differs from traditional web apps. In short, AI-driven automation makes new kinds of observability workflows both necessary and possible.

This season of IT Ops Query will feature interviews with a variety of industry expert guests on how AI, including agentic AI...

SecOps, developers and infrastructure ops teams are often encouraged to work more closely together within IT, but for one industry analyst, the CrowdStrike outage exposed an even more significant gap between IT and businesses. 

Charles Betz is vice president and principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research. He has also worked as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and ...

In October, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a report that's still generating buzz in the security world – it questioned the data sources in often-cited reports about the value of "shifting left". Another section of the CISA report called into question the idea that security flaws cause people to stop using products and concluded that "In general, it seems that quality failures don’t always affect ...

Doug Merritt was CEO of Splunk from 2015 to 2021 and led the company's transition from an on-premises software company to a cloud-based service provider. After two years in the venture capital and board advisory space, Merritt joined multi-cloud networking company Aviatrix as CEO in 2023. That company introduced its first security product, a distributed firewall for Kubernetes, in May, and rolled out a managed version of its multi-...

Robert Slaughter is CEO of Defense Unicorns, a defense tech startup specializing in Airgap software delivery in highly secure and sensitive environments in the military and federal government. Previously, he was director of the U.S. Department of Defense's Platform One DevSecOps project and co-founder at Space CAMP, a predecessor of Platform One for the US Space Force. Prior to starting Defense Unicorns, he served 12 years in the U...

Joshua Corman is executive in residence for public safety & resilience at The Institute for Security and Technology (IST), a non-profit think tank based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also co-leader of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) community working group for SBOM on-ramps & adoption. Previously, he was vice president of cybersecurity strategy for Claroty, an IoT security company; chief str...

Chris Steffen is vice president of research for information security at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates. He previously held a variety of IT leadership roles at companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and DXC Technology. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences, the host of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness podcast and a frequent guest on other IT security podcasts.

The day of the CrowdStrike outage, Steffen...

Esteban Gutierrez is chief information security officer and vice president of information security at observability vendor New Relic. Previously, he was an enterprise information security strategist at Intel, and he managed the network operations and security center for the US Army Corps of Engineers.

He shares takeaways from New Relic's recent State of Observability survey, lessons learned from his career in cybersecurity about br...

Rich Lane is currently IT director at the City of Medford, Massachusetts, and has had a varied career in IT infrastructure and operations. He served as VP of digital operations strategy for data security software vendor Netenrich from 2021 to 2022, and as a Forrester Research analyst from 2018 to 2021. Before that, Lane worked as a professional services consultant for observability vendor Splunk, and as IT infrastructure and operat...

Melinda Marks is cybersecurity practice director for TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group analyst firm. Previously, she held a variety of roles in the IT and cybersecurity industry, including marketing and PR leadership positions at vendors such as VMware, Qualys, Tenable Network Security. Just before joining ESG in 2021, she was chief strategy officer and CMO at Soluble, makers of a CI/CD security and compliance automation tool ...