Building Observability for the Innovators

It's definitely busy.

Uh, I mean, obviously the observability industry's, uh, uh, got a lot of work, uh, cut out for it at the moment.

What is, like, the most top-of-mind thing regarding trying to help customers today? Like, I mean, obviously OTel is almost old at this point since 2019, but, you know, what is old is new again, so...

But maybe there's something else particularly on your mind.

Yeah, I mean, I think it's just a lot of customers that we're working with are just going through revamping their observability strategies.

Uh, and there's a lot of reasons for that.

Uh, you know, the two things that, you know, their engi- engineering leadership, you know, is focused on is reducing costs, right, and improving productivity, right? Like, well, basically that's, that's the things that they care about most.

Um, and, you know, what we've seen is observability is a big part of that.

Observability, you know, for a lot of our customers, uh, you know, is a very large line item on their bills, and so they want to work out ways where they can optimize those costs.

So they're trying to balance both deliver more observability to their developing teams, at the same time do it cheaper.

Um, you know, so it's a little bit of conflicting priorities there.

I, I think, uh, everyone's familiar with Coinbase reporting pre-pandemic the $65 million spend on, uh, Datadog.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting.

There's, there's, uh...

It's not unusual.

You know, we do see a lot of customers that have very, very large bills.

Um, and the thing that we're hearing from those customers is that they just feel that there's just misalignment between the cost and the value.

You know, back in the days when, um, you know, interest rates were $0, right, and, and money was free, um, it didn't matter, right? Like, you could just go and spend money, uh, and all you really cared about was that velocity, that engineering velocity, go and get things done.

Um, but then when things changed and, uh, we started caring about money again, uh, it matters now, right? People want to still, um, you know, have their observability, but they really wanna align that, that cost and value and make sure that it's making sense from a, a business perspective.

How have you been able to overcome that sort of duality there where it does seem like fundamentally since if nothing goes wrong, it's a lot like security, that's the best you can hope for, and then when there is an issue, uh, you are actually reporting on that effectively, so you can dive in and solve that.

Uh, I think companies historically that have lots of problems are easy to justify a spend in observability, but the ones who need it the most, uh, tend to have fewer issues, uh, reported, right? The ones that have to have higher reliability.

So especially the changeover in since we've left the money is free era, how have you been able to sort of make that justification or, uh, the mindset shift for those customers to really understand what they're getting out of the stack?

What it really comes down to is, you know, really focusing on developer productivity.

You know, our engineers are very busy, right? We've had this, you know, shift over the last decade or so, a little bit more, right, to this DevOps motion, right, where more and more is being put on the developers to go, uh, they have to be responsible for, right? Not only are they writing the code, they're testing it, they're deploying it, and they're operationally responsible for it.