>>From San Francisco. It's the cube covering PagerDuty summit 2019 brought to you by PagerDuty. >>Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with the Q. We're a PagerDuty summit. It's the fourth year of the show. He's been here for three years. It's amazing to watch it grow. I think it's finally outgrown the Western Saint Francis here in lovely downtown San Francisco and we're really excited to be joined by our next guest. He's Alex Solomon, the co founder, co founder and CTO PagerDuty. Been at this over 10 years. Alex, first off, congratulations. And what a fantastic event. Thank you very much and thank you for having me on your show. So things have changed a lot since we had you on a year ago, this little thing called an IPO. So I'm just curious, you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs. I watch a show as a founder and kind of go through this whole journey. What was that like? What are some of the things you'd like to share from that whole experience? >>Yeah, it was, it was incredible. I I, the word I like to use is surreal. Like just kind of going through it, not believing that it's real in a way. And adjoining by my, my lovely wife who came, came along for this festivities and just being able to celebrate that moment. I know it is just a moment in time and it's not, it's not the end of the journey certainly, but it is a big milestone for us and uh, being able to celebrate. We invited a lot of our customers, our early customers have been with us for years to join us in that, a celebration. Our investors who have believed in us from back in 2010. Right, right. We were just getting going and we just, we just had a great time. I love it. I love 10 year overnight success. 10 years in the making. >>One of my favorite expressions, and it was actually interesting when Jenn pulled up some of the statistics around kind of what the internet was, what the volume of traffic was, what the complexity in the systems are. And it's really changed a lot since you guys began this journey 10 years ago. Oh, it has. I mean back then, like the most popular monitoring tool is Nagios and new Relic was around but just barely. And now it's like Datadog has kind of taken over the world and the world has changed. We're talking about not just a microservices by containers and serverless and the cloud basically. Right. That's the kind of recurring theme that's changed over the last 10 years. But you guys made some early bets. You made bets on cloud. He made bets on dev ops. He made bets on automation. Yeah, those were pretty good. >>Uh, those, those turn out to be pretty good places to put your chips. Oh yeah. Right place, right time and um, you know, some, some experiential stuff and some just some raw luck. Right. All right, well let's get into it. On top of some of the product announcements that are happening today, what are some of the things you're excited to finally get to showcase to the world? Yeah, so one of the big ones is, uh, related to our event intelligence release. Uh, we launched the product last year, um, a few months before summit and this year we're making a big upgrade and we're announcing a big upgrade to the product where we have, uh, related incidents. So if you're debugging a problem and you have an incident that you're looking at, the question you're gonna ask is, uh, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? >>So we'll show you that very quickly. We'll show you are there other teams, uh, impacted by the same issue and we'll, we, we actually leveraged machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents. Right. I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you play with all these other tools. We, you know, we're just at Sumo logic a week or so ago. They're going to be on later their partner and people T I think it's confusing. There's like all these different types of tools. And do you guys partner with them all? I mean, the integration lists that you guys have built. Um, I wrote it down in service now. It's Splunk, it's Zendesk, it goes on and on. And on. Yeah. So explain to folks, how does the PagerDuty piece work within all these other systems? Sure. So, um, I would say we're really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. >>So any sort of tool that's monitoring something and we'll admit an alert, uh, when something goes down or over an event when something's changed, we integrate and we have a very wide set of coverage with all, all of those tools. I think your like Datadog, uh, app dynamics, new Relic, even old school Nagios. Right. Um, and then we've also built a suite of integrations around all the ticketing systems out there. So service now a JIRA, JIRA service desk, um, a remedy as well. Uh, we also now have built a suite of integrations around the customer support side of things. So there'll be Zendesk and Salesforce. That's interesting. Jen. Megan had a good example in the keynote and kind of in this multi system world, you know, where's the system of record? Cause he used to be, you want it, everybody wanted it to be that system of record. >>They wanted to be the single player in the class. But it turns out that's not really the answer. There's different places for different solutions to add value within the journey within those other applications. Yeah, absolutely. I, I think the single pane of glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing, but it's, it's, it's really hard to do because like for example, NewRelic, they started an APM and they got really good at that and that's kind of their specialty. Datadog's really good at metrics and they're all trying to converge and do everything and become the one monitoring solution to the Rooney rule them all right. But they're still the strongest in one area. Like Splunk for logs, new Relic and AppDynamics for APM and Datadog for metrics. And, um, I don't know where the world's going to take us. Like, are they, is there going to be one single monitoring tool or are, are you going to use four or five different tools? >>Right. My best guess is your, we're going to live in a world where you're still gonna use multiple tools. They each can do something really well, but it's about the integration. It's about building, bringing all that data together, right? That's from early days. We've called pager duty, the Switzerland monitoring, cause we're friends with everyone when we're partners with everyone and we sit on top right a work with all of these different roles. I thought her example, she gave him the keynote was pretty, it's kind of illustrative to me. She's talking about, you know, say your cables down and you know, you call Comcast and it's a Zendesk ticket. But >>you know then that integrates potentially with the PagerDuty piece that says, Hey we're, you know, we're working on a problem, you know, a backhoe clipped the cable down your street. And so to take kind of that triage and fix information and still pump that through to the Zen desk person who's engaging with the customer to actually give them a lot more information. So the two are different tracks, but they're really complimentary. >>Absolutely. And that's part of the incident life cycle is, is letting your customers know and helping them through customer support so that the support reps understand what's going on with the systems and can have an intelligent conversation with the customer. So that they're not surprised like a customer calls and says you're down. Oh, good to know. No, you want to know about that urge, which I think most people find out. Oh yeah. Another thing >>that struck me was this, this study that you guys have put together about unplanned work, the human impact of always on world. And you know, we talk a lot in tech about unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime of machines, whether it's a, a computer or a military jet, you know, unplanned maintenance as a really destructive thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone frame it for people and really to think about kind of the unplanned work that gets caused by an alert and notification that is so disruptive. And I thought that was a really interesting way to frame the problem and thinking of it from an employee centric point of view to, to reduce the nastiness of unplanned work. >>Absolutely. And that's, that V is very related to that journey of going from being reactive and just reacting to these situations to becoming proactive and being able to predict and, and, uh, address things before they impact the customer. Uh, I would say it's anywhere between 20 to 40 or even higher percent of your time. Maybe looking at software engineers is spent on the some plant work. So what you want to do is you want to minimize that. You want to make sure that, uh, there's a lot of automation in the process that you know what's going on, that you have visibility and that the easy things, the, the repetitive things are easy to automate and the system could just do it for you so that you, you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires. Right? Or if you did to fix the fire, you at least >>to get the fire to the right person who's got the right tone to fix the type. So why don't we just, you know, we see that all the time in incidents, especially at early days for triage. You know, what's happening? Who did it, you know, who's the right people to work on this problem. And you guys are putting a lot of the effort into AI and modeling and your 10 years of data history to get ahead of the curve in assigning that alerted that triage when it comes across the, the, uh, the trans though. >>Yeah, absolutely. And that's, that's another issues. Uh, not having the right ownership, get it, getting people, um, notified when they don't own it and there's nothing they can do about it. Like the old ways of, of uh, sending the alert to everyone and having a hundred people on a call bridge that just doesn't work anymore because they're just sitting there and they're not going to be productive the next day I work cause they're sitting there all night just kind of waiting for, for something to happen. And uh, that's kinda the, the old way of lack of ownership just blasted out to everyone and we have to be a lot more target and understand who owns what and what's, what, which systems are being impacted and they only let getting the right people on the auto call as quickly as possible. The other thing that came up, which I thought, you know, probably a lot of people are thinking of, they only think of the fixing guy that has to wear the pager. >>Sure. But there's a whole lot of other people that might need to be informed, be informed. We talked about in the Comcast example that people interacting with the customer, ABC senior executives need to be in for maybe people that are, you know, on the hook for the SLA on some of the softer things. So the assembly that team goes in need, who needs to know what goes well beyond just the two or three people that are the fixing people? Right. And that's, that's actually tied to one of our announcements, uh, at summit a business, our business response product. So it's all about, um, yes, we notify the people who are on call and are responsible for fixing the problem. You know, the hands on keyboard folks, the technical folks. But we've expanded our workflow solution to also Lupin stakeholders. So think like executives, business owners, people who, um, maybe they run a division but they're not going to go on call to fix the problem themselves, but they need to know what's going on. >>They need to know what the impact is. They need to know is there a revenue impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a reputational brand impact to, to the business they're running. Which is another thing you guys have brought up, which is so important. It's not just about fixing, fixing the stuck server, it's, it is what is the brand impact, what is the business impact is a much broader conversation, which is interesting to pull it out of just the, just the poor guy in the pager waiting for it to buzz versus now the whole company really being engaged to what's going on. Absolutely. Like connecting the technical, what's happening with the technical services and, and uh, infrastructure to what is the, the impact on the business if something goes wrong. And how much, like are you actually losing revenue? There's certain businesses like e-commerce where you could actually measure your revenue loss on a per minute or per five minute basis. >>Right. And pretty important. Yeah. All right Alex. So you talked about the IPO is a milestone. It's, it's fading, it's fading in the rear view mirror. Now you're on the 90 day shot clock. So right. You gotta keep moving forward. So as you look forward now for your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year or so that you kind of want to drive this shit? Absolutely. So, um, I think just focusing on making the system smarter and make it, uh, so that you can get to that predictive Holy grail where we can know that you're going to have a big incident before it impacts our customers. So you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. So if we've seen this pattern before and last time it causes like an hour of downtime, let's try to catch it early this time and so that you can address it before it impacts for customers. >>So that's one big area of investment for us. And the other one I would say is more on the, uh, the realtime work outside of managing software systems. So, uh, security, customer support. There's all of these other use cases where people need to know, like, signals are, are being generated by machines. People need to know what's going on with those signals. And you want to be proactive and preventative around there. Like think a, a factory with lots and lots of sensors. You don't want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to like get proactive about the maintenance of those systems. If they don't have that, uh, you know, like say a multi-day outage in a factory, it can cost maybe millions of dollars. Right. >>All right, well, Alex, thanks a lot. Again, congratulations on the journey. We, uh, we're enjoying watching it and we'll continue to watch it evolve. So thank you for coming on. Alright, he's Alex. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. We're at PagerDuty summit 2019 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> From Union Square in downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Pager Duty Summit '18. Now, here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey welcome back here everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at Pager Duty Summit 2018, at the Weston St. Francis, Union Square in San Francisco. It's a beautiful day outside, a really historic building, and we're happy to be here for our second Pager Duty Summit, and our next guest, super excited to have him, we didn't have him last year. He's Alex Solomon, the Co-Founder and CTO of Pager Duty, Alex, great to see you. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> Absolutely, so we were just talking a little bit. Before we turned the cameras on, you started this little adventure in '09, so it's been nine years. So what, I'd just love to get your perspective, as you come to something like this, and look at all these people that are here, to see what started as just a germ of an idea, back in your head nine years ago. >> Yeah, it's exciting to see such an amazing conference. We have over 800 people here today, and it's definitely buzzing. I could feel the excitement in the air. >> Right, well Ray Kurzweil is the Keynote, that's getting right up there. >> Exactly. >> Really an amazing story. One of the things that was, that was key to Ray's topic was the accelerating technology curve, in terms of power and performance, and it's not linear, it accelerates, and you guys have seen a huge growth in your business, and your throughput and all the incidents that you're reporting, and now we're talking about BI, and using Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence to make some sense and to help filter through all this phenomenal amount of throughput. So how are you, how do you see that opportunity, how are you guys grasping the opportunity? What are you going to do with that Machine Learning? >> Sure, so about three months ago, we launched our new Event Intelligence product, which is all about capturing the, all the signals coming out of all of your different tools, things like monitoring tools. Things like ticketing systems, collaboration tools like Slack, and processing all those signals, mostly events and alerts and filtering out the noise. So a lot of alerts and events are not necessarily relevant for someone to get paged about in the middle of the night. Maybe it's a false alert, maybe it's something that has gone up, and will fix itself. >> Right. >> So it's about filtering out all the noise in there, and it's also about automatically clustering, and correlating related events. So we take those events in, and then we group them together into incidents, and we determine the surface area of the problem, which systems are affected, and we page those people, and only those people, so that they can respond to the incident. >> Right. So do you leverage the total learning of the Pager Duty System, in kind of an anonymized way, so you can leverage the multi-billions of dollars worth of incidents to get that type of learning, that was one of Ray's key themes, it helps if you have a billion of something, if you want to start applying some of these Machine Learning techniques. >> Exactly, so the more data you have when you're applying AI and ML, the better the results will be. We have over nine years of data that we've accumulated since founding the company, and we leveraged that for (mumbles) conditions, so for, I'll give you an example. If you're looking at an incident, you just got paged for something, or multiple people got paged, and you're looking at an evolving situation, our algorithms will automatically look in the past, and see has this type of problem happened before? Have you seen this type of incident before? Have you seen these events come in before, that are similar to this and, if so, what happened last time? >> Right. >> Who solved it, what was the resolution, so you can apply that knowledge, to the problem, and resolve it much faster. >> Right. So is it? So you do it both within the existing company, and their ecosystem so yeah, Joe solved it last time, Suzie solved it the time before, as well as to get more of an aggregate, of kind of an anonymized of we see this pattern over and over and over, this might be what you're looking at. >> Yeah, and we haven't done the aggregate picture yet, but it's something that we're very excited about, because we have the potential to become kind of like the Internet weather, where we can tell, based on the number of customers that we have, problems with the Internet, such as, let's say one of the Public Cloud providers is having an issue. Well, they have lots of customers that are Pager Duty customers, and they can now see oh, we have, we're seeing all of this additional incident activity, in this part of the Internet. >> Right. So there's something going on. >> Right. >> And we can start, this is an opportunity that we're very excited about, start telling, being able to tell, oh there's a problem with one of the Cloud providers, there's a problem with one of the main, big infrastructure providers that is commonly used by a lot of different companies. >> Right, because so many of these systems now, are so interdependent. You've got all these APIs, from all these different applications, all these different Cloud providers, and the whole thing stitched together so, trying to figure out where that little, the glitch is, is not necessarily as easy as when you kind of controlled everything. >> Exactly. >> It's funny too, because Jen had a line from her Keynote, which you just triggered. She said, "You know, we're the ones that want to be up, "when the rest of the world seems down." >> Yeah, exactly. >> So, let me expand on that a little bit. So you were the Founder. Jennifer came in a couple years ago, if I recall. I'm sure everyone who loves the classic entrepreneur tale, who liked to watch the show. You founded it, you got it to a certain point, and at some point you decided, you're going to bring in a new CEO. Wonder if you can talk a little bit about how that process went down. Kind of your thoughts as a Founder, of making that transition to see your company go, from this stage to that stage. >> Sure, sure, so yeah, I was the Founding CEO. I built, well me, not just by myself, but with my two Co-founders, and with the great team that we hired, we built the company from zero to over fifty million in annual recurring revenue. The company, when we decided to make that transition, I got into about 200 people or so. So a pretty good scale starting from nothing. >> Yeah, and to a fifty million run right, that's good. >> Yeah, and I'm a first-time entrepreneur, so I haven't done this before, and at that point we had a lot of work to do on the product side of things, like a lot of exciting new things, such as Event Intelligence that we just launched earlier this year, and other products are on Analytics and Visibility, that we're announcing here today. But I found myself spending a lot of my time, inside the building hiring and managing, and I didn't get enough of an opportunity to talk to customers and think about product, and think about the vision, what should we be building next? >> Right, right. >> So I wanted to go and focus more of my time in that direction. I initially started by thinking, maybe I can hire a CEOO, like a Chief Operating Officer to run Sales/Marketing and I can focus on Product and Engineering. Did a lot of due diligence, and talking to other CEOs who had been there, and done that, and realized that while that may solve some problems, it introduces new ones, and that the best bet is to find a World Class CEO. Like the best people out there in the world, are going to command that title, and they're going to want that role. >> Right. >> And I could still get to focus on product, and on talking to customers, and on vision, by replacing myself and taking on a CTO role, so that's what I ultimately decided to do. Had lots of help from the Board, who was very supportive in this decision, and they helped a lot with the interview process for, and the screening process for finding Jennifer. >> Well, you did good. We've known Jennifer for a long time, so I think that was one of your better hires. >> Absolutely. >> In the long history of the company. >> My best hire. Your best hire, very good. Well, and again, congratulations, it's funny you know, you see it over and over right? Overnight successes that are 10 years in the making. You know clearly, your last round of funding was a huge validation on your guy's strategy, and where you're taking the company, and then I just want to call out too, you guys were chosen for the Ernst & Young Co-founder, wait, hold on, the Entrepreneur of the Year Award 2018. Which is funny because you always think of that as maybe a little company just getting started right, or a really early entrepreneur. But you guys have been at this for nine years. Again, really good validation as to where you are in the market, and people realizing the value that you guys are delivering, so congratulations on that. >> Thank you very much. >> Alright Alex, well thanks for taking a few minutes from I'm sure, a very busy couple of days, and it was great to meet you. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me on the show. >> Alright, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. We're at Pager Duty Summit 2018, thanks for watching. (bright music)