Ahead of the upcoming KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 conference, VMblog sat down with Tucker Callaway, CEO of Mezmo, to get a quick overview of the company and learn what Mezmo has planned for the event.

Mezmo helps organizations control telemetry data with confidence, providing a smart data pipeline and log management solution to collect, profile, transform, and route high volumes of data.

In this interview, Callaway discusses Mezmo's offerings, the challenges the company is addressing for developers and SREs, and what attendees can expect to see and experience at Mezmo's booth during the conference.

VMblog:  If you were giving a KubeCon attendee a quick overview of the company, what would you say? How would you describe the company?

Tucker Callaway:  Mezmo helps organizations control telemetry data with confidence. Telemetry data refers to logs, metrics, traces, and events from your infrastructure or your custom applications. Built to deliver quick value, Mezmo's platform makes it easier to understand data, optimize it, and respond quickly to any incident or data change.  Organizations consistently struggle with the high volumes of telemetry data and costs related to managing the high volumes. Moreover, the MTTR or the resolution times do not necessarily decrease. Developers, SREs, and business users want to unlock technical and business insights in the data but find it hard to do so.

Mezmo delivers a smart telemetry data pipeline and log management that collects, profiles, transforms, and routes high volumes of data in motion to provide teams with control to utilize their data with confidence and cost-effectively. With Mezmo, organizations can reduce data volumes by more than 40%, operationalize better data orchestration, improve data quality, and enable visualization for quick analysis and incident resolution.

With the Mezmo platform, developers and SREs get the data they need in the right format at the right time to debug and troubleshoot issues intelligently without the annoyance of cost overages, lack of data access, or all-too-familiar alert fatigue.

VMblog: How can attendees of the event find you? What do you have planned at your booth this year? What type of things will attendees be able to do at your booth?

Callaway:  Attendees can connect with us at Observability Day on November 12 or visit Mezmo at booth #R16 during KubeCon for a live demo of Mezmo Flow, which is launching at the conference. Stop by, try our new offering, and share your feedback at the booth for a $25 gift card.

VMblog: What are you personally most interested in seeing or learning at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon?

Callaway:  Standards are the backbone of our industry, and I am interested in learning more about the development and adoption of standards across the industry, particularly OpenTelemetry. I am excited to see that there are over 15 sessions covering the topic. There is so much to learn from everyone's experiences in adopting and implementing OpenTelemetry for their observability initiatives.

VMblog: What kind of message will an attendee hear from you this year? What will they take back to help sell their management team and decision-makers?

Callaway:  We are committed to improving developer and SRE productivity and believe that user experience is key to their success. Whether it is the product's ease of use, guided experiences, access to documentation, or technical help when needed, such enablement and empowerment are very important to the community. At this KubeCon, we are bringing new offerings to the users that will streamline the way users access, understand, control, and utilize telemetry data all by themselves and in under 15 minutes.

We want to ensure that developers do not have to choose between how much data they can log and how fast they can debug and troubleshoot issues, especially with custom applications. In addition, we want to ensure that SREs have an easy way to understand logs, monitor any data spikes, solve any infrastructure issues, and easily provision data to downstream teams and systems. We want to share with the community how it is possible to control data volumes while maintaining and even enhancing data quality.

At KubeCon, we will offer users a hands-on, no-login playground and hope to gather their candid feedback. Users can try the Mezmo platform, experience opportunities for log volume reduction, accelerate resolution times, extract actionable metrics from the data, and share operational improvements with their management team.

VMblog: Can you double-click on your company's technologies? And talk about the types of problems you solve for a KubeCon + CloudNativeCon attendee.

Callaway:  As mentioned above, developers and SREs, who constitute a large majority of KubeCon attendees, are still struggling with the high volumes and costs of telemetry data, high incident resolution times, and a lack of insights to make timely decisions. Mezmo offers a telemetry pipeline and log management for streamlined data collection, automated profiling, transformation, routing, and analysis.

Mezmo has taken a unique approach to applying AI and data engineering principles to help organizations understand the data using data profiling and recommend optimizations, optimize the data by transforming it for the right formatting and removing noise, and finally respond to incidents by utilizing in-stream alerts and Next-Generation Log Management, which speeds up analysis and incident resolution.

The Mezmo platform powers next-generation log management with its pipeline-first approach, which lets users control their data, spend less time on data wrangling, and get insights sooner. SREs find it easy to use and quick to set up. You can build your first pipeline in less than 15 minutes and make the right data, in the right format, available to software teams for analysis and troubleshooting. Mezmo supports the OpenTelemetry standard for data collection to increase data utilization. We also offer Kubernetes enrichment so that teams can effectively use Kubernetes data for incident resolution and extracting technical and business insights.

VMblog: While thinking about your company's solutions, can you give readers a few examples of how your offerings are unique? What are your differentiators? What sets you apart from the competition?

Callaway:  Mezmo's platform is changing the way enterprises think about telemetry data. Where most organizations are focused on curtailing the data volumes, Mezmo enables more value from the data and reduces log volume. Our customers are seeing a reduction in their log volumes in the range of 40-90%, and they are using data in innovative ways to make business decisions. Setting up telemetry pipelines and getting started with log management and analysis should not be cost-prohibitive and should not take months to set up. Working with over 1,500 customers and 20,000 users, Mezmo has understood the complexity of dealing with log data and delivering the ease of use and quick time to value that our users expect from the product.

Mezmo's mission is not only to provide organizations with control over their data volumes and costs but also to provide confidence in the data so that they can get maximum value from it. Our automated data profiling simplifies setting up pipelines, making users more productive. Our unique data aggregation capabilities enable in-stream alerts and health monitoring so SREs can have tighter control of the data. Moreover, Mezmo enables a responsive pipeline, which looks out for data aberrations and switches to an "incident mode," rerouting the data or sending adjusted volumes of data if any incident occurs.

VMblog:  KubeCon + CloudNativeCon is typically a great venue for a company to launch a new product or an update to an existing product. Will your company be announcing anything new? If so, can you give us a sneak preview?

Callaway:  On November 12 at KubeCon, Mezmo will announce some exciting updates to its platform that help companies control incoming data volumes, identify valuable data, and glean insights faster. Look to us for industry-first capabilities that bring to life intelligent telemetry pipelines, improve SRE and developer experiences, and accelerate how they collect and utilize telemetry data.

VMblog: Are you giving away any prizes at your booth or participating in any prize giveaways?

Callaway:  We're hosting daily raffles, giving away swag with our new mascot, and handing out copies of our refreshed O'Reilly Report: The Fundamentals of Telemetry Pipelines. Our latest product will be available, and users can have hands-on experience with it. We will also offer a gift card to those who opt to give us feedback on our latest release at our booth. We want to hear from the developer and SRE community about how we can make their experience better.

VMblog: Is your company sponsoring any type of party or get-together during the event that you'd like to notify attendees about?

Callaway:  Yes, we're hosting an Observability Happy Hour at STK on Thursday, November 14, at 4:30 p.m., with our friends from Gremlin. Join us to eat, drink, and chat with observability practitioners, just steps from the Salt Palace Convention Center.

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