Nobl9, the service level observability
company, recently announced that it had raised $15.8 million from ServiceNow,
Cisco Investments, and existing investors including Battery Ventures and CRV. VMblog caught up with Kit
Merker, Chief Growth Officer at Nobl9, to discuss the funding, wider market
adoption of SLOs and the third annual online SLOconf taking place May 15-18.
VMblog: Tell me about the funding and
what you plan to do with it.
Kit
Merker: We've secured $15.8 million in
funding, with strategic investments from ServiceNow and Cisco and all our
existing investors including Battery Ventures and CRV. While the last year has
been tough economically, customers are quickly adopting Nobl9 to help them
deliver new innovations, reduce costs, and stay up and running. Despite today's
uncertain economic environment, our investors have reaffirmed their confidence
in Nobl9's capacity to help organizations increase their agility and improve
performance.
This
new funding lets us continue to expand our product, delivering top-notch
SLO-centric capabilities to our customers. We are investing in education around
SLOs within the community with SLOconf, OpenSLO, and SLODLC. Our customers have
put a lot of faith in us, and we take that responsibility seriously.
VMblog: Tell me more about the
growing SLO adoption across enterprises.
Merker: Throughout 2021 and 2022, we've seen
accelerating growth in the adoption of SLOs across enterprises and mid-market
companies, which significantly contributed to our record 4th quarter results.
The findings of the State of SLOs report, conducted by Dimensional
Research, revealed that the adoption and use of SLOs have steadily increased
among enterprise IT professionals. More than 80 percent of 300 surveyed
companies have increased their utilization of SLOs in some capacity. The
growing SLO usage has mainly focused on new technologies, such as
microservices. 87 percent of respondents reported that using SLOs for these
purposes would improve their performance.
These
findings have also highlighted a trend in adopting and using SLOs by business
teams outside IT operations. We see executives, manufacturing professionals,
researchers and developers, marketing professionals, and those in finance all
adopting SLOs to gain better visibility into the effectiveness of their
operations.
VMblog: What is driving the
increasing demand for SLOs?
Merker: Enterprises are increasingly under
pressure to create a scalable relationship between operations and software
services while delivering consistent customer experience and reducing
operational costs. As these pressures grow more demanding, innovative SLO
solutions present an attractive option for organizations looking to efficiently
address their challenges and maintain streamlined operations with minimal
overhead costs.
SLOs
give enterprises the flexibility and scalability to ensure that services can
meet their customers' requirements. By setting specific performance,
availability, and latency objectives based on user and business expectations,
SLOs make it easy to monitor service performance and take action when necessary
- proactively! This helps enterprises quickly identify areas of improvement and
adjust their operations accordingly.
Furthermore,
SLOs help ensure that customer experience remains consistent throughout their
interaction with a business. By establishing specific objectives for service
delivery and performance, companies can guarantee that the same level of
quality is provided across all channels. It helps to ensure customer
satisfaction and trust in an enterprise's capabilities.
VMblog: Have you introduced any new
features to the Nobl9 Platform?
Merker: We announced a really cool new
capability called "Replay" that lets you look back up to 30 days when ingesting
an SLO, speeding up development and adoption. We also have a new product tier
called Nobl9 Free Edition. It's a perpetual free version of our award-winning
SLO Platform. This new hosted solution lets you create SLOs using metrics and
observability data from 24+ popular tools. These include Lightstep from
ServiceNow, Cisco AppDynamics, Prometheus, Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace,
Google Cloud Monitoring, Amazon Cloud Watch, Amazon Managed Service for
Prometheus, Splunk, and many more.
VMblog: Is there anything else you'd
like to share with our readers?
Merker: We recently announced our 3rd annual conference, SLOconf,
which will take place May 15-18, 2023. It's the only event dedicated to the
practice and application of SLOs and features industry leaders in SRE, DevOps,
and software engineering, and is open to everyone. We are currently accepting
speaker applications, and anyone interested can visit the event website at https://www.sloconf.com/
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