>> Presenter: From around the globe, it's the cube, with digital coverage of pager duty summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. >> Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin, today talking with Tammy Bryant is a cube alumna, the principal Site reliability engineer at Gremlin and the co-founder and CTO of the Girl Geek Academy. Tammy, it's great to have you on the program again. >> Hi Lisa, thanks so much for having me again. It's great to be here. >> So one of the things I saw in your background 10 plus years of technical expertise, and SRE, and chaos engineering, and I thought chaos engineering, I feel like I'm living in chaos right now. What is chaos engineering and why do you break things on purpose? >> Yep. So the idea of chaos engineering is that we're, breaking systems but in a thoughtful controlled way, to identify weaknesses in systems. So that's really what it's all about. The idea there is, you know, When you're doing really complicated work with technical systems, so like, for example, distributed systems and say, for example, you're working at a bank, it's tough to be able to pinpoint the exact failure mode that could cause a really large outage for your customers. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. you inject the failure proactively, to identify the issues and then you fix them before they actually cause really big problems for customers and you do it during the middle of the day, you know, when you're feeling great, instead of being paged in the middle of the night for an incident, that's actually like causing your customers pain, and making you lose a lot of money. So that's what chaos engineering really is. >> Are you seeing in the last six months since the world is so different, are you seeing an increase in customers? Now with, the for example, Brick and Mortars shut down and everything having to convert to digital if it wasn't already? Is there an increase in demand for chaos engineering services? >> Yeah, definitely. So a lot of people are asking what is chaos engineering, how can I use ,it will it help me reduce my incidents? and definitely because there are a lot of new services that have been rolled out recently, say, for example, curbside pickup. That's a whole new thing that had to be created really recently to be able to handle a large amount of load. And you know, people show up, they want to get their product really fast, 'cause they want to be able to just get back home quickly. And that's something that we've been working on with our customers is to make sure that curbside pickup experience is really great. The other interesting thing that we've been working on because of the pandemic is making sure that banks are really reliable, and that customers are able to get access to their money when they need it. And able to see that information too. And you can imagine that not as when you're in lockdown, and you only can leave your house for maybe an hour a day, you need to be able to quickly get access to your money to buy food, and we've seen some big incidents recently, where that hasn't been the case. Yeah. >> And I can imagine I mean, just thinking of what happened with, everything six months ago and how people were, we are just, demanding, right, consumers were demanding, we expect to get whatever we want, whether it's something we buy on Amazon, something that we stream on Netflix, or whatnot, we have this expectation that we can almost get it in real time. But there was a there was, you know what, there was a delay a few months ago, and there still is to some degree. But companies like Amazon and Netflix, I can imagine, really must have a big focus on chaos engineering, to test these things regularly. And now have proved, I would imagine to some degree that with chaos engineering that they have built, they're built to withstand that. >> Yes, exactly. So our founders at Gremlin came from Netflix and Amazon, our CEO had worked at both where he done chaos engineering, and that's actually why he decided to create Gremlin. It's the first company in the world to offer chaos engineering as a service. And you know, obviously, when you're working somewhere like Netflix, you know the whole product, you have to be able to get access to that movie, that TV show, right in that moment, and also customers expect to be able to see that on for example. There PlayStation in their living room and it should work and there paying for a subscription, So, to be able to keep them on that subscription, you need to offer a great service. Same thing with Amazon, you know, Amazon.com, they've done a lot of chaos engineering work over many years now to be able to make sure that everything is available. And it's not just that, the entire amazon.com is up and running. It's also for example, that when you go and look at a page that the recommendation service works toO and they're able to show you, hey, here's some other things that you might like to get to buy at this time. And I like as as a consumer, I love that 'cause it helps me save time and effort and even money as well 'cause it's giving you some good advice. So that's the type of statement we do. >> Exactly, So. when you're working with customers, I'd love to understand just a little bit from the, like the conversational standpoint is this now, is chaos engineering now, at kind of the sea level or is it still sort of in within the engineering folks 'cause looking at this as a make or break, knowing that for example, Netflix, there's Hulu, there's Disney Plus, there's Apple TV. Plus, if we don't get something that we're looking for right away, there's prime, we're going to go to another streaming service. So are you starting to see like an increase in demand from companies that no, we have competition right behind us, we've got to be able to set up the infrastructure and ensure that it is reliable. Now more than ever. >> Yeah, exactly. That's really, really important. I'm seeing a lot of executives. I mean, I've seen that since the beginning, really, since I first started working at Gremlin. I would often be invited by executives to come and give talks actually, within their company, to help the teams learn about chaos engineering, and I love doing that, It's really great. So I'd be invited by C levels, or VPs, from different departments. And I often get people adding me on LinkedIn from all over the world who are in leadership roles, because really, like, you know, they're responsible for making sure that their companies can hit those critical metrics and make sure that they're able to achieve their really, you know, demanding business goals, and then they're trying to help their teams be able to achieve that, too. So I've actually been so pleased to see that as well. Like it is really cool to have an executive reach out and say, hey, I'm thinking of helping my team, I'd like to get them introduced to you can you come and just teach them about this topic? And I love being able to do that it's really positive. And it's the right way to improve. >> It is, and I think nowadays, with reliability being more important than ever, you know, we talked to leaders from industry, from every industry. And there are certain things right now that are going to be shaping the winners and the losers of tomorrow. And it sounds to me like chaos engineering is one of those things that's going to be fundamental to any type of business to not just survive these times, but to thrive going forward. >> Yes, I definitely think so. I mean, obviously, people can easily just go to a different URL and try and use a different service. And you know, we're seeing now failure across so many different industries. We didn't see that before. But for example, you know, I'm sure you've seen in the news or heard from friends and family about schools, now being completely online. And then kids can't actually access, their calls their resources, what they need to learn every day. So that really just shows you how much it's impacting us as a society, we really know that the internet is critical. It's amazing that we have the internet, like how lucky we are to have this, but it needs to work for us to actually be able to get value out of it. And that's what chaos engineering is all about. You know, were able to make sure that everything is reliable, so it's up and running. And we do that by looking at things like redundancy. So we'll do failover work where we completely shut down an application or service and make sure it gracefully fails over. We also do a lot of dependency failure work, where you're actually looking to say, this is the critical path of this service. And a lot of people don't think about this, but the critical path really starts at sign in. So you need to make sure that login and sign in works really well. It's not just about like the experience once you've signed in, that has to work well all the way through. So actually if you have a good understanding of user experience, it helps you create a much better pathway and understand those critical pieces that the customer needs to be able to do to have a great experience. And I care a lot about that. Like whenever I go and work somewhere, I always read customer tickets, I always try and understand what are the customer pain points. And I love listening to customers and then just solving their problems. The last thing I want them to do is, you know, be complaining or be really annoyed on Twitter because something just isn't working when they need it to be working. And it is really critical these days. It's a the internet is a really serious part of our day to day life. >> Oh, it's a lifeline. I mean, that's, some folks. It's the only way that they're connecting with the outside world, is through the internet. So when things aren't, I had a friend whose son first day of college couple weeks ago, freshman year, first class couldn't get into zoom. And that's a stressful situation. But I imagine too, though, that and I know you're going to be speaking at the pager duty summit that more folks need to understand what this is. And I can tell the you have a real authentic passion for it. Talk to us about what you're going to be talking about at the pager duty summit. >> Sure thing, I'm really excited to be speaking at Pager Duty Summit very soon. My talk is called building, and scaling SRE teams, so site reliability engineering teams. And this is something that I've done previously. I've built out the SRE teams at Dropbox for both databases as well as storage. So block storage, and then I also lead the code workflows team. And that's for, you know, over 500 million users, people accessing the critical data that they store on Dropbox all the time. You know the way that folks use Dropbox is in so many different ways. Maybe it's like really famous music musicians who are trying to create an amazing new album that happens or maybe it's a lawyer preparing for a court case, and they need to be able to access their documents. So those are a lot of customer stories that would come up over time. And prior to that, I worked at the National Australia Bank as well leading teams too and obviously like people care about their money if they can't access their money. If there incorrect transactions, if there are missing transactions, you know, duplicate transactions, maybe people don't mind so much about it you get like a double deposit, but it's still not good from the bank's perspective. So there's all types of different chaos that can happen. And I found it to be really interesting to be able to dive into that and make sure that you can make improvements. And I love that it makes customers happier. And also, it helps you improve your company as a whole. So it's a really good thing to be able to do, And with my talk, I'm going to talk to folks about, you know, not only why it's important to build out a reliability practice at your organization, you know, back in the day, people used to go, why would you need a security team? You know, why would we need that? now everybody has a security team, everyone has a chief security officer as well. But why don't we focus on reliability, like we know that we see incidents out in the news all the time, but for some reason, we don't have the chief reliability officer. I think that's definitely going to be something that will appear in the future just like the chief security officer roll up. But that's what I'm going to talk about there. How you can find site reliability engineers, I'll share a few of my secrets. I won't give any spoilers out. But there's actually quite a few places that you can find amazing people. There's even a school that you can hire them from, which I've done in the past. And then I'll talk to you about how you can interview them to make sure that you get the best people on your team. There are a number of things that I think are very important to interview for. And then once you've got those folks on your team, I'll talk to you about how you can make sure that they're successful. How to set them up for success and make sure that they're aligned to not only your business goals, but also your core values as a company, which is really important too. >> Yeah, that's fantastic. It's very well rounded, I'm curious, what are some of the the characteristics that you think are really critical for someone to become a successful SRE? >> Yeah, so there's a few key things that I look for. One thing is that, somebody who is really good at troubleshooting, so they need to be able to be comfortable with complexity, ambiguity and open ended challenges and problems and also thrive in those types of environments. Because often you're seeing something that you've never seen happen before. And also you're working with really complicated systems. So you just need to be able to feel good in that moment. And you can test for that during an interview question on troubleshooting and debugging. So that's something that I'll go into in more detail. But that's definitely the first characteristic. The other thing, of course, is you want to have someone who is good at being able to build solutions. So they can code, they understand automation, they can figure out how can I take this pain point, this problem? And how can I automate it and then scale this out and make it available for everyone across my organization? So someone who has that mindset of building tools for others, and often they are internal tools, because maybe you're building a tool that helps everybody know, who's on call every single critical service at the company and also non critical service and they can identify that in a minute or less like maybe even just in a few seconds, and then they can quickly get that person involved, if anything need to escalate to them. Via for example, a tool like pager duty, that's really what you want. You want them to be able to think, how can I just make this efficient? How can I make sure that we can get really great results? And yeah, I think they also just need to be really personable too and work well in a really complicated organizational structure. Because usually they have to work with the engineering team, the finance team to understand the revenue impact. They need to be able to work with the PR team and the social media team, if they're incidents, and then they need to provide information about when this incident is going to be resolved, and how they can update VIP customers. They need to talk to the sales team, because what happens if you're giving a demonstration, and then somehow there's an issue, or failure that happens, an incident and then in the middle of your very important sales demo, you're not able to actually deliver it that can happen a lot too. So there are a lot of very important key skills. >> Sounds like it's a really cross functional role, pivotal to an organization, that needs to understand how these different functions not only operate, but also operate together, is that somebody that you think has certain types of previous work experience? Is this something that you talked to the Girl Geek Academy girls about? How did they get into? I'm curious, like what the career path is? >> Yeah, it's interesting, like I find a lot of SRE's often come from either a few different backgrounds. One is they came through the world of Linux and understanding systems, and just being really interested in that. Like deep diving into the kernel, understanding how to improve performance of systems. The other side is maybe they came from coding background where they were actually building applications and features. I started off actually on that side, but I also had a passion for Linux. And then I sort of spread over into the other side and was able to learn both. And then often you know, someone who's comfortable with being on call and handling incidents, but it is a lot of skills, like that's actually something that I often talk to folks about, and they asked me how can I become a great SRE? There's so many things I need to learn. And I just say, you know, take it slow, try and gradually increase your number of skills. People often say that there is like there's some curve for SRE's, where you have the operations side, on one side, and then the coding side on the other. And often like the best person sits right in the middle where they have both ops and engineering skills. But it's really hard to find those people. It's okay if you have someone that's like, really deep, has amazing knowledge of Linux and scaling systems and internet management, and then you can pair them up with a really amazing programmer who's great at software engineering and software architecture, that's okay, too. >> We've been hearing for a long time about this sort of negative unemployment with respect to cyber security professionals. Is that, are you guys falling into that same category as well with SRE? Or is it somehow different or you just know this is exactly what we're looking for? We want to go out there, and even in the Girl, Greek Academy, maybe help girls learn how to be able to find what I imagine are a lot of opportunities. >> Yeah, there are so many opportunities for this. So it's definitely an opportunity because what I see is there's not enough SRE's. So tons of companies all over the world will actually ping me and say, hey, Tommy, how do I hire SRE's, that's why I decided to give this talk because I wanted to package that up and just share that information as to how you can do it. And also, maybe you can't find the SRE's because they don't exist. But you can help retrain your team. So you can have an engineer learn the skills that are required to be an SRE, that's totally possible too, maybe move them over to become an SRE. With girl geek Academy, one of the things that I've done is run hackathons and workshops and just online training sessions to help girls learn these new skills. So that's exactly what our mission is, is to teach 1 million girls technical skills by 2025. And I love to do mentoring at scale, which is why it's been really cool to be able to do it online and through these like workshops and remote hackathons. And I definitely love to do something where else work with some of our customers actually, and run an event. I did one a while back, it was really cool, we were able to have all of the girls come in and be at the customer's office and actually learn skills with the customer, which was really fun. And it helps them actually think, hey, I could work one day that would be really amazing. And I'm going to do that again in November. And it's kind of fun too. We can do things like have like, you know, dad and mom and then daughter day, where you actually bring your daughter to work and help her learn technical skills. That's really fun because they get to see what you do and they understand it more and see how cool chaos engineering really is. Then they think oh, wow, you're so awesome, this is great. >> I love it, that's fantastic. Well it sounds like, like I said before your passion for it is really there. What, I think is really interesting is how you're talking about chaos engineering and just the word in and of itself chaos. But you painted in such a positive lights critical business critical, but also the all the opportunities there that businesses have to learn and fine tune so such an interesting conversation. Yeah, Tammy. We have you back on the program. But I thank you so much for joining me today. And for those folks that lucky enough that are attending the pager duty summit, they're going to get to learn a lot from you. Thank you. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> For Tammy Bryant, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching this cube conversation. (upbeat music)

>>from >>around the >>globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of pager duty. Summit 2020. Brought to you by pager duty. Hey, welcome back to Brady. Jeffrey here with the Cube in Palo Alto studios today. And we're talking about an upcoming event. It's one of our favorites. This will be the fourth year that we've been doing it. And it's pager duty summit. And we're excited to have from the pager duty team. She's Caroline Gus, the VP of corporate marketing from pager duty. Caroline, Great to see you. >>Hi, Jeff. Great to see you again. >>Absolutely. So, you know, I was thinking before we turn on the cameras we've been doing pager duty for I think this will be like, say, our fourth year that first year was in the cool, um, cruise ship terminal pier. I gotta written appear 27 which was which was nice. And then the last two years, you've been in the, you know, historic Westin ST Francis in downtown San Francisco, which is a cool old venue, but oh, my goodness. You guys were busting at the seams last year. So this year, year to go virtual. There's a whole bunch of new things that that you could do in virtual that you couldn't do in physical space. At least when you're busting out of the seems so First off, Welcome and >>talk a little >>bit about planning for virtual versus planning for a physical event from, you know, head of marketing perspective. >>Absolutely. I mean, the first thing that's changed for us is the number of people that can come. It's five x the number of people that were able to join us, the Western last year. So we have, uh, we we expect to have 10,000 people registered on attending age duty summit. The second thing is thea share number of sessions that we can put on. Last year, I think we had around 25 sessions. This year we have between 40 and 50 on again. That's because we're not constrained by space and physical meeting rooms, so it's being a really exciting process for us. We've built a fantastic agenda on. It's very much personalized, you know, developers come to our event. They love our event for the opportunity to learn mixed with their peers, get best practices and hands on experience. So we have many more of those types of sessions when we have done previously, and that things like labs and Bird of Feather Sessions and Emma's. But we've also built a whole new track of content this year for executives. Page Julie has, um, many of the Fortune 500 on 4100 customers. We work very closely with CEO CTO, so we have built sessions that are really designed specifically for that audience on I think for us it's really opened up. The potential of this event made it so much broader and more appealing than we were able to do when we were, As you say, you know, somewhat confined by the location in downtown San Francisco. >>I think it's such an interesting point. Um, because before you were constrained, right, If you have X number of rooms over a couple of days, you know you've got to make hard decisions on breakouts and what could go in and what can't go in. And, you know, will there be enough demand for these for this session versus another session? Or from the perspective of an attendee, you know, do they have to make hard tradeoffs? I could only attend one session at one oclock on Tuesday and I got to make hard decisions. But this is, you said really opens up the opportunities. I think you said you doubled. You doubled your sessions on and you got five X a number of registrations. So I think, you know, way too many people think about what doesn't happen in digital vs talking about the things that you can do that are impossible in physical. >>Yeah, I think at the very beginning. Well, first of all, we held our Amir summit events in London in July. So that was great because we got Thio go through this experience once already. And what we learned was the rial removal of hurdles in this process. So, to your point about missing the session because you're attending another session, we were calling this sort of the Pelton version of events where you have live sessions. It's great to be there, live participate in the live Q and A, but equally you have an entire on demand library. So if you weren't able to go because there was something else at the same time, this is available on demand for you. So we are actually repeating live sessions on two consecutive day. So on the Monday we're on everything on the Tuesday I ask because show up again for life Q and A at the end of their sessions. But after that it's available forever on an on demand library. So for us, it was really removing hurdles in terms of the amount of content, the scheduling of the content on also the number of people that content in attend, no geographical boundaries anymore. It used to be that a customer of ours would think, Well, I'll send one or two people to the page duty summit. They could learn all the great innovation from page duty, and they'll bring it back to the team that's completely changed. You know, we have tens of 20 signing up on. All of them are able to get that experience firsthand. >>That's really interesting. I didn't didn't even think about, you know, kind of whole teams being able to attend down instead of just certain individuals because of budget constraints, or you can't send your whole team, you know, a way for a conference in a particular area. But the piece to that you're supporting that were over and over is that the net new registrants goes up so dramatically in terms of the names and and and who those individuals are because a lot of people just couldn't attend for for various reasons, whether it's cost, whether it's, uh, geography, whether it's they just can't take time off from from from leaving their primary job. So it's a really interesting opportunity to open up, um, the participation to such a much bigger like you said five x five X, and increase in the registration. That's pretty good number. >>That's right. Yeah. I mean, that crossed boundaries gone away. This event is free on DWhite. That's actually meant is, as I say, you know, larger teams from the same company are attending. Uh, In addition, we have a number of attendees who are not actually paid to duty customers right now to previously. This was very much a community event for, you know, our page duty users on now we actually have a large number of I asked, interested future customers that will be coming to the event. So that's really important for us. And also, I think, for our sponsor partners as well, because it's bordering out the audience for both of us. So let's >>talk about sponsors for a minute, because, um, one of the big things in virtual events that people are talking about quite often is. Okay, I can do the keynotes, and I could do the sessions. And now I have all these breakout sessions for, um, you know, training and certification and customer stories, etcetera. But when it comes to sponsors, right sponsors used, you know, go to events to set up a booth and hand out swag and wander badge. Right? And it really was feeding kind of a top level down funnel. That was really important. Well, now those have gone away. Physical events. So from the sponsor perspective, you know, what can they expect? What? What do you know the sponsor experience at pager duty Summit. Since I don't have a little tiny booth at the Westin ST Francis given out swag this year. >>Yeah. So one important thing is the agenda and how we're involving our sponsors in our agenda this time, something that we learned is we used to have very long keynotes. You know, the keynote could be an hour long on involved multiple components and people would stay in that room for a now er on did really stay and watch sessions all day. So we learned in the virtual format that we need to be shorter and more precise in our sessions on that opened up the opportunity to bring in more of our partners, our sponsorship partners. So zendesk Salesforce, Microsoft some examples. So they actually get to have their piece of both of our keynote sessions and of our technical product sessions. I'm really explain both the partnership with pager duty, but also they're called technology and the value that they provide customers. So I think that the presence of sponsors in content is much higher than it was before on we are still repeating the Expo format, so we actually do have on Expo Hall that any time there's breaking between sessions, you could go over to the Expo ball, and it actually runs throughout as well, and you can go in and you can talk to the teams. You can see product demos, so it's very much a virtual version of the Expo Hall where you went and you want around and you picked up a bit of swag, >>so you mentioned keynotes and and Jennifer and and the team has always had a fantastic keynotes. I mean, I just saw Jennifer being interviewed with Frank's Luqman and and Eric Juan from Zoom By by Curry, which was pretty amazing. I felt kind of jealous that I didn't get to do that. But, um, talk tell us a little bit about some of the speakers I know there'll be some some, you know, kind of big rally moment speakers as well as some that are more down to technical track or another track. Give us some highlights on on some of the people. I will be sharing the stage with Jennifer. >>Absolutely, I said. I think what's really unique about Page duty Summit is that we designed types of content for different types of attendees. So if you're a developer, your practitioner, we have something like this from Jones of Honeycombs, who's talking about who builds the tools that we all rely on today, and how do they collaborate to build them together in this virtual world? Or we have J. Paul Reed from Netflix talking about how to handle the stress of being involved in incidents, So that's really sessions for our core audience of developers who are part of our community and pager duty really helps them day to day with with that job. And then we have the more aspirational senior level speakers who could really learn from a ZA leader. So Bret Taylor, president and CEO of Salesforce, will be joining us on the main stage. You'll be talking about innovation and trust in today's world on. Then we have Derrick Johnson. He is president of N A A. C P, and he'll be talking about community engagement and particularly voter engagement, which is such an important topic for us right now. Aan den. We have leaders from within our customers who are really talking about the way they use pager duty thio drive change in their organization. So an example would be porches, bro. He runs digital for Fox on, and he's gonna be talking about digital acceleration. How large organization like Fox can really accelerate for this digital first world that we find ourselves living in right now, >>right? Well, you guys have such a developer focus because pager duty, the product of solution, has to integrate with so many other, um, infrastructure, you know, monitoring and, uh, and all of all those different systems because you guys were basically at the front line, you know, sending them the signals that go into those systems. So you have such a broad, you know, kind of ecosystem of technology partners. I don't know if people are familiar with all the integrations that you guys have built over the years, which is such a key piece of your go to market. >>That's right. I mean, we we like to say we're at the center of the digital ecosystem. We have 203 170 integrations on. That's important because we want anyone to be able to use page duty no matter what is in their technology stack technology stacks today are more complex than they've ever been before, particularly with businesses having to shift to this digital first model since we all began shelter in place, you know, we all are living through digital on working and learning through digital on DSO. The technology stacks that power that are more complicated than ever before. So by having 370 integrations, we really know that we conserve pretty much any set of services that your business. It's using. >>Yeah, we've all seen all the means right about who's who's pushing your digital transformation. You know, the CEO, the CEO or or covert. And we all know the answer to toe what's accelerated that whole process. So okay, but so before I let you go, I don't even think we've mentioned the date. So it's coming up Monday, September, September 21st through Thursday, September 24th not at the West End Online and again. What air? What are you hoping? You're kind of the key takeaways for the attendees after they come to the summit? >>Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, first of all, I think will be a sense of belonging. Three attendees, the uses, a pager duty. They are really the teams that are at the forefront of keeping our digital services working on. But what that means is responding to incidents we've actually seen. Ah, 38% increase in the volume of incidents on our platform since covert and shelter in place began. Wait 30 >>38% increase in incidents since mid March. >>That's correct. Since the beginning of on bear in mind incidents. Prior to that in the six months prior, they were pretty flat. There wasn't instant growth. But what we've also seen is a 20% improvement in the time that it takes to resolve an incident from five minutes down to four minutes. So what that really means is that the pager duty community is working really hard. They're improving their practices. Hopefully our platform, our platform is a key part of how, but these are some people under pressure, so I hope that people can come and they can experience a sense of belonging. They can learn from each other about experiences. How do you manage the stress of that situation on what are some of the great innovations that make your job easier in the year ahead? The second thing that we don't for that community is that we are offering certification for P. D. You page due to university for free this year. It's of course, with a value of $7500. Last year, you would attend page duty summit on you would sit through your sessions and you would learn and you would get certified. So this year it's offered for free. You take the course during summit. But you can also carry on if you miss anything for 30 days after. So we're really feeling that, you know, we're giving back there, offering a great program for certification and improved skills completely free to help our community in this in this time of pressure, >>right? Right. Well, it is a very passionate community, and, you know, we go to so many events and you can you can really tell it's palatable, you know, kind of what the where the tight communities are and where people are excited to see each other and where they help each other, not necessarily only at the event, but you know, throughout the year. And I think you know a huge shout out to Jennifer on the culture that she's built there because it is very warm. It's very inclusive, is very positive. And and that energy, you know, kind of goes throughout the whole company and ice the teaser. You know this in something that's built around a device that most of the kids today don't even know what a pager is, and just the whole concept of carrying a pager and being on call right and being responsible. It's a very different way to kind of look at the world when you're the one that has that thing on your hip and it's buzzing and someone's expecting, Ah, return call and you gotta fix something So you know, a huge shout out to keep a positive and you're smiling nice and big culture in a job where you're basically fixing broken things most of the time. >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there's, I think, a joke that we make you know these things only break on Friday night or your wedding anniversary or Thanksgiving. But one of the announcements we're most excited about this year is the level of automation on artificial intelligence that we're building into our platform that is really going to reduce the number of interruptions that developers get when they are uncle. >>Yeah, I look forward to more conversations because we're gonna be doing a bunch of Cube interviews like Normal and, uh, you know, applied artificial intelligence, I think, is where all the excitement is. It's not a generic thing. It's where you applied in a specific application to get great business outcomes. So I look forward to that conversation and hopefully we'll be able to talk again and good luck to you and the team in the last few weeks of preparation. >>Thanks so much, Jeff. I've enjoyed talking to you. Thanks for having me. >>Alright. You too. And we'll see you later. Alright. She is Caroline. I'm Jeff. You're watching the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>>from San Francisco. It's the Q covering pager duty. Summit 2019. Brought to you by pager Duty. >>Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff? Rick here with the Cube. We're downtown San Francisco at the historic Western St Francis. A pager. Duty summit. It's the fourth year pager duty Summit, 30 year for the Q. Being here, I think they've about outgrown the venue. So he looked forward to seeing where we go next year. But we're excited to have somebody is at a very busy day. A lot of product announcements leading a lot of this effort. He's Jonathan. Randy, this s V P. Of product for pager duty. Jonathan, great to see you. Thanks for having me. So, congratulations. A lot of Ah lot of product announcements today. >>This is our biggest unveiling of the year. >>What s so I don't want you to pick your favorite baby, but what are some of the highlights? That goddess here today? >>Yes, a couple of big things today and tomorrow, not just today. >>Uh, >>first, we're really focused on applying. It is the buzzword of the sense of the new Millennium machine learning, but we're applying it across our entire portfolio, and we're doing it in a good way, not in a creepy way. We're doing in a good way to help organizations make sense of all the data they're getting. Tell him what's happening and, more importantly, what they could do to get better. And so that's something that we call our intelligence Dashboards is part of our analytics products. That's one big one, right? Right. And as you probably know, being here, pager duty is all about helping teams to be more effective in the moments that matter. And one of the other big announcements we have is intelligent triage. And so what is it way See with There's a lot of great companies here, partners that we're working with and whenever they're working, major issues within their companies were seconds, matter or even microseconds. They could lose millions of dollars that work in real time. They'll find out that there's multiple teams working on the same problems on Lee for one team to find out that somebody's undoing some of things that they're doing. So we focused in a huge way on building context, the visibility so that the teams in see what other issues air related That's what we call intelligent triage. So nobody needs to do double work, >>right? It's funny on the on the A I right in machine learning because they are the hot, hot, hot buzzword. But what I don't think are the hot buzzards, which is where all the excitement is happening, is it's the applied A I it's not Aye aye, for a eyes sake. Or were great. Aye aye company with an aye aye widget that we want to sell you. It's really leveraging a I within your core application space, your core domain expertise to make your abs do better things. And that's really what you guys have embraced. >>Absolutely. It's way have to be so empathetic to our users. Are users carry an unbelievable burden. They are on the front lines when things go down. They have, you know, minutes, seconds to make right decisions, and there's a lot of responsibility with that. So we're using a I in applied way to help them make sense of being overloaded with information, focus them in on the things that can make the biggest positive impact right, So it is applied a I in its purest form and >>the other part I found interesting is really anak knowledge mint that it's not just the people that have to fix the problem that needs to know about the problem, but there's a much larger kind of ecosystem that ecosystem around. That problem, whether it's sales reps executive for certain, is a whole bunch of people that should know, need to know, have value, to know beyond just the really smart person that I've now put on fixing the >>problem. You're bringing up a great point, which is a lot of people know page of duty because of how we help technical teams, developers and office people fix these incidents. When they happen right when a site goes down or when something search isn't working correctly but getting work done. We're taking that in its broadest context. It's beyond technical responders. First we have to service them. They're our core audience. They're why we're here today. But that unit of work getting work done goes beyond them as you're saying. It goes to what we call business responders who I could be working in a customer service team and while that incident is happening, I need that information so that I can ready my communication in case somebody calls up the sports desk and opens up a ticket. I need to know what to tell him right when it's gonna be fixed and how we're addressing their problems. Or I could be the CFO, a stakeholder and just want to know what's the real revenue impact of this outage of this time? So whether I'm taking action or I just need to know these air people outside of the sphere of the technical team and their business responders and stakeholders and we're automating the flow of information all of them so that they don't interrupt the poor responders team so they can focus on their work, >>right? Yeah. Another concept that kind of clarified today is all of your guys partnerships. You know, you've listened on your integration page on the Web site. It's clear. Well, data dog sales for Zenda Sumo AWS service now last CNN, IBM Blue mix. I mean, it's they can't go through the whole list. It's a huge list, but I think confusion in the market or maybe clarification is helpful is, you know, kind of where to those systems play versus your system when that Everyone wants to be a system of record, right? Everybody wants to be the database that has all the all the information. And yet you figured out a way to take your capabilities and augment all these other platforms and really puts you in a nice play across a really wide range of a problem. Sets. >>Yeah, it's it's so core to who we are way like to think of our pager duty platform. I always refer to it as it's a central nervous system, and what does that really mean? We always say it's a central nervous system and pager duty is about people. So all of those vendors, all of those companies, they're all valued partners. Many of them are customers of pager duty as well. They use us to keep their service is up on the monitoring world. But what pager duty is always focused on is ensuring that people two people collaboration to get real work done based on the information coming from those folks. So a lot of those vendors out there they play such an invaluable part of the ecosystem. They let us know they provide all the telemetry in the information in the data way, make sense of it and then engage people Finish that work. So in a way, you know that central nervous system is taking all these impulses just like a really central nervous system. And we're engaging the right people to help them effectively get the right right, and we couldn't do it without them. So the famous 350 plus way couldn't do what we do without them, and they're all here today. You >>didn't think I was going to read the whole hunt 350 >>Hope. That would be a long way >>Hades in desk on. And I know that was part of the new customer service and has been getting, you know, kind of your value kind of closer to the actual customer transaction. It's always in support of the customer transactions. The website's down transaction close, but this actually has taken it to the next level toe. Have a direct contact to the person who's actually engaged with the client to give them or inside is what's going on as being resolved in these type thing with a two way communication pattern. >>Yeah, it's something I'm personally really excited about. Where customer of zendesk as well. So we use end us and they use pager duty. So we get a lot of feedback on what's working, what's not working, which informed us and what we were doing. But there's two big problems in the industry that I've seen over, you know, two plus decades, which is customer service and support teams. They're dealing also on the front lines. Having them communicate and get information from development teams isn't always easy. And so both of us are really interested in kind of breaking down the walls between those organizations. But doing so in a way that's not interrupting those teams when they're doing their work that they have, right, so one, that's what we wanted to accomplish. How can we share information seamlessly automatically? So both teams are in sync, but they're not pestering each other and then to that work that's being done on the development side, when something does go wrong in a devil apps world, now, the customer support agents, the service agents they can get ahead of those cases that are being opened up, so they're not in the dark. They're not being flooded by tons of cases being opened up and they don't know what to say. They ready their communications and push it out because they're insane. >>It's really you think pager duty and notifications were surrounded by all these dashboards and computer stuff, but you made a really instant comment. It's all about the people you guys commissioned. A study called I'm gonna read an unplanned work, the human impact of an always on world and really going after unplanned work. Now it's funny, because everyone always talks about unplanned maintenance and on scheduled maintenance and the impacts on aircraft and the impacts on power generation and aircraft. This is the first time I've ever heard anyone couch it as as unplanned, which is completely disruptive fours on people and their lives, not to mention their service workers. And, according to the study, 2/3 of her pissed off and not too happy the way things are going at work anyway, with what kind of was zenith of that. And that's a really great way to reframe this problem into something much more human. >>The genesis of this all came from the concept that a CZ you'll read a lot we say we're always on. Let's keep it that way. Let's help help everyone. Keep it that way. It's a mantra with pager duty, and it comes from again when I say Genesis, it comes from even within our platform way. Don't have me Windows. We are on 24 7 360 days a year way have to be up when other service's aren't because of that. Whenever we work with organizations or vendors that that we pay for. And they say we have a maintenance window like a maintenance window my partner in crime runs engineering team are meant for. He always says maintenance Windows air for cars, not SAS software like there are no maintenance windows. And what that means as a first step is, if that's the case, there's no maintenance windows you're always on. Then you have to answer this question of how much time are you really spending unplanned work interruptions, right? So we really started taking not the heart. We really started trying to figure out what is the percentage everybody's trying to innovate more. That's planned war, right? Is it? 10% is a 20%. Is it 50%? The best organizations we see our 20 to 25% is unplanned work. We'll >>need 25% for the best organization. >>Yeah, so means not. So best organizations are very different, right? And so way feel that we uniquely can help organizations get way better at cutting down that time so that they can innovate more, Right? They're not firefighting. They're actually innovating and growing their business right. That's a big part of how we help people in these organizations do their job better. >>God, that's before you get in contact. Switching and pressure and disruption and >>way found some amazing statistics in my prior life. Iran Engineering. And it was at a sauce company. And what I found was whenever customers, whenever my top engineers would be put on Call Way, didn't have pager duty at the time, and they would be on call and interrupted on consecutive nights in the middle of the night. First, I would typically hear about when somebody was burned out is when I would see a resignation letter on my desk or somebody way no, after two or three or four successive interruptions in someone's personal life that goes on where they feel they're not being productive. One, they aren't productive at work either, to they're a huge retention risk. So way have that kind of data. We can look at it, and we can help management and organizations help them. And their teams take better care of their teams so that, you know, they're they're being more humane, humane knots, not human off pain, All right. And how you deal with those most expensive precious resource is in your company, which are your people is really important >>when they walk out the door every night, you know? So you gotta take care of him. So they come back the next day. It is? Yes. All right, Jonathan, last question is you as we wait, we're not quite done with some yet, but as we come to the closest on her arm really busy year. The AIPO. You guys have done amazing things, but you kind of flipped the calendar. Look forward. What are some of your kind of priorities as we as >>we move forward? Yeah. So it's been a crazy year. A lot of change and a couple things going forward. One were big partners with Amazon in a W S S O were attending reinvent. That's a big event for the company, but also at this event. As I mentioned before, it's probably our biggest unveiling of new innovations and products for our entire 12,000 plus customers. So for us, it may seem like it's an end. It's really just the beginning, because all of these products and intelligent triage business response, intelligent dashboards, these products that are apart, his capabilities that are part of our analytics and events intelligence on the pager duty, platform way have to keep evolving This we have to keep kind of moving forward because the world is always on and we've got to keep it that way. >>What? Andre just had a great line in his keynote about being scared is the generator of wisdom. But here it is, right here. Fear is the beginning of wisdom. Not necessarily fear, but fear getting caught. Keep moving that we have ahead of the pack. All right, Jonathan, Thanks for taking a few minutes and congratulations. I'm sure tough getting all those new babies out this week, but what a great what a great job. Thank you so much. All right. Pleasure. He's Jonathan. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cube. Where? Pager duty Summit in 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)