
Reliability is critical to business
success and customer happiness, moving organizations to implement more
observability and monitoring tools than ever before to help them maximize
efficiency. Creating the right Service Level Objectives (SLOs) is key to maintaining
reliable software, tracking error budgets and doing more with less. To find out
the latest on SLOs, I caught up with Kit Merker, Chief Growth Officer of
Nobl9, one of the first
companies to provide a mainstream SLO management platform called Reliability
Center. Nobl9 recently introduced a new integration with Microsoft Azure
Monitor in order to simplify the creation and management of SLOs.
VMblog: We haven't caught up with you
in a while. How is the business of SLOs, and improving cloud reliability?
Kit Merker: The business of SLOs is all about giving customers a way to define,
measure and report on the performance of their applications and systems -
including in the cloud. Organizations are finding out the value of SLOs and how
they can help them make informed decisions to scale their services according to
customer demand, ensuring that they have the necessary resources to deliver
high-quality services even during peak times. Implementing SLOs with Nobl9
Reliability Center provides customers with a framework for measuring their
cloud services' performance against user expectations. SLOs also help companies
establish a culture of service reliability by stressing the importance of
setting objectives and measuring performance, and by encouraging collaboration
and accountability among teams. Several of Nobl9's new features, including
dashboards and reports designed to let executives and engineers understand a
Reliability Score calculated from all the SLOs they want to manage, help teams
improve overall business functions while enabling efficient cloud resource
allocation to reduce costs. This granular level of observability is key for
improving cloud reliability given the scale and complexity of modern cloud
ecosystems.
VMblog: Nobl9 announced an integration
with Microsoft Azure Monitor at Microsoft Ignite. How does the integration
between Azure and Nobl9 help customers with SLOs?
Merker: The main goal of Nobl9's integration with Azure Monitor is to simplify
SLO creation and management - it drastically reduces the time and effort needed
to implement SLOs. Azure Monitor collects and analyzes telemetry data from
cloud and hybrid environments, helping customers proactively identify problems
based on insight into the performance and availability of cloud resources. With
our new integration, Azure Monitor users can use Nobl9's service level
indicator analyzer (SLI Analyzer) to create SLOs immediately from existing
Azure monitoring data. They can also quickly find and use historical data to
select the optimal SLO targets, and really unlock the full potential of Azure
Monitoring metrics. That removes all of the guesswork in where to set the goal
or threshold of the SLO.
Setting reliability goals is only
getting more difficult at the scale and intricacy of our enterprise customers,
so integrating Nobl9 into Azure Monitor offers a game-changing framework for
monitoring applications, services, and infrastructure across cloud environments
and on-premise resources. This new integration is one of our most robust data
source integrations yet and creates an entirely new way for Azure Monitor users
to leverage their data.
VMblog: What are some reasons that
organizations might want to leverage SLOs as they interact with cloud
providers?
Merker: Creating useful SLOs is one of the most effective approaches being
adopted by organizations to maximize cloud resources, because SLOs offer a
measurable and objective approach to reliability and ensure that the service
provided to users is consistent and stable. In fact, Nobl9's recent "2023 State-of-SLOs" report found that 82% of respondents
plan to increase the use of SLOs, and 95% indicated that SLO adoption is
driving better business decisions.
The beauty of SLOs is that they allow
management and development teams to treat reliability as a feature, rather than
an afterthought. Customers can proactively address bugs and vulnerabilities,
thus reducing software downtime and increasing service quality. Integrating
SLOs into your workflow may be an initial investment, but when working with
cloud providers like Azure Monitor, that investment is a game-changer for
optimizing reliability practically and efficiently. Leveraging useful SLOs
saves you tremendous time and money across your cloud deployments, because you
can easily manage the complete reliability lifecycle. Ultimately, that elevates
customer experience and ensures you're fulfilling customer expectations and
delivering on service-level agreements.
VMblog: What are some key features of
the Azure integration?
Merker: Nobl9 Reliability Center covers the entire observability ecosystem, and
helps customers understand their software reliability. With the integration
with Azure Monitor, Nobl9 provides customers with an end-to-end experience
allowing them to discover, create, calibrate and deploy SLOs efficiently and
easily. One key feature is metrics discovery, which streamlines the creation of
Azure Monitor SLOs based on existing Azure resources in just a few
clicks.
Another great feature is
pre-fabricated reliability goals. These are prewritten SLOs with smart defaults
common to infrastructure use cases on Azure, which provide out-of-the-box
reliability objectives so there is zero guesswork for customers. Additionally,
the integration gives customers easy customization and deployment with Nobl9
SLI Analyzer. The Analyzer retrieves historical reliability data from Azure
Monitor which lets you calibrate reliability targets to specific customer
needs.
VMblog: What benefits can customers
expect from using Nobl9 with Azure Monitor?
Merker: Speed and ease. Using Nobl9 Reliability Center's integration, customers
can create useful SLOs in minutes. They simply establish a connection and Nobl9
pulls in Azure Metrics data immediately after they become available in Azure
Monitor. We also support importing up to 30 days of historical data and
performing data analytics using Nobl9's SLI Analyzer. Azure Monitor users can
leverage existing data to automatically create SLOs without the guesswork of
predicting a meaningful threshold or goal for their SLO. The Nobl9 integration
with Azure Monitor is also the first in our inventory that supports the
discovery of clients' resources and metrics. Once you set up an Azure Monitor
data source, you don't need to remember or copy-paste any specific resource identifier
or metric name. Customers can easily explore all resources and their metrics
within the Nobl9 web application. Because of these capabilities, users can
quickly set goals without guessing and better manage and respond to reliability
concerns.
VMblog: Nobl9 also recently launched
an integration with the Cisco Observability Platform. How does that integration
work with Nobl9 Reliability Center?
Merker: We're thrilled to partner with Cisco and contribute to their Full-Stack
Observability solution suite. We already have several integrations with Cisco
products, but this latest module extends our reach into the Cisco Observability
Platform, giving customers visibility into reliability issues across their
entire technology stack. This ensures that enterprises leveraging Cisco's
observability ecosystem can access Nobl9's robust, end-to-end reliability
solution.
VMblog: What can VMblog readers expect
from Nobl9 in the future? Is there anything else we should know?
Merker: First of all, come see us at AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas this month!
We'll be in booth 1090, "Smooth Operations" is our theme this year. We'd love
to see you and talk about all things reliability.
In terms of 2024, we intend to keep
pushing the boundaries of what's possible in software reliability. That means
you can expect more partnerships with powerful observability leaders, like
Microsoft Azure Monitor and Cisco Observability Platform, but also new
developments within Nobl9's platform. We're always working on new features that
make reliability easier, more cost-efficient, and more applicable to every
organization. And we're committed to increasing collaboration between
management and technical teams in terms of reliability; in the end, we all
share the same goals of maintaining smooth operations and delivering for our
end-users. If you'd like to try Nobl9 Reliability Center yourself, there is a
free version with lots of introductory documentation. For those looking to dive
deeper, we offer the SLO Academy and offer support to help you get
started.
##