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Tag: Nobl9

  • Increasing Use of SLOs to Enable Observability

    Increasing Use of SLOs to Enable Observability

    Observability is a growing discipline among most IT and operations departments. To release stable software faster, operators need continuous visibility into metrics like performance, uptime and availability. As a result, engineers are increasing their use of service-level objectives (SLOs) across the board—a recent study found that 82% of companies are increasing their use of SLOs.

    SLOs enable deep visibility into specific applications’ performance and are often used by site reliability engineers (SREs) to ensure quality and avoid service interruptions. Not only that, but various teams are correlating SLOs to aspects of the business to reduce cost and help direct decision-making. But while many environments have visibility, there are still gaps present.

    Nobl9 recently released a global survey of IT professionals and executives that tracked the state of service-level objectives in 2022. Below, we’ll look at the key findings from the report and consider what they mean for the state of SLOs and observability in general.

    State of Observability and SRE

    In general, site reliability engineering is still maturing across organizations. Though only 31% of companies have adopted SRE, it’s slated for much future growth, as 46% said they plan to embrace SRE in the future.

    These operators are now faced with many cloud-native observability tools, which are producing a sea of data in the form of metrics, logs and traces. A full 39% of companies use anywhere from six to 10 observability and monitoring tools and 35% use more than 11.

    With so many tools now deployed, who is using this observability and monitoring data? Namely, at 74% of companies, observability data support operational requirements. Operations teams are the ones most likely to use SLOs to monitor uptime, performance and overall efficiency. After operations teams, security teams also use this observability data (71%), which makes sense as SLOs can inform incident response. Other areas that follow are customer support, compliance and capacity planning.

    One interesting finding is that only 42% of companies use SLOs for service-level agreement (SLA) adherence. This indicates that SLOs are most often applied to internal optimizations and decision-making.

    Hybrid Environments Complicate Visibility

    Companies are mostly tracking SLOs to increase their visibility into networks (83%), databases (76%) and applications (75%). Other top areas include private cloud environments and legacy computing arrangements. But although observability is trending, organizations still lack complete visibility across the entire stack.

    Of note is that nearly half (46%) of respondents said their monitoring and observability tools don’t provide full visibility into all of their company’s IT assets. For example, only 45% of companies have visibility into their containers and just 35% have visibility into their microservices architecture.

    A lack of full-stack visibility may be complicated due to rising hybrid and multi-cloud conditions, as 78% say a hybrid cloud environment makes monitoring infrastructure more difficult.

    Benefits of Tracking SLOs

    The report defined SLO as “a performance and availability target set for a given system, application [or] service over time.” And the benefits are readily apparent for organizations following such targets—they can help increase performances, direct decision-making and help avoid outages.

    As a result, 70% of companies are currently using SLOs in some fashion. Here are some benefits of tracking SLOs:

    • Increase microservice performance: 87% said using SLOs for microservices architecture would improve service performance.
    • Enable full-stack observability: 58% said some of their company SLOs are mapped to business operations.
    • Improve business decision-making: 91% agreed using SLOs can help drive better business decisions.
    • Prevent service interruption: 67% said their company prevented business interruptions thanks to SLO thresholds alerts.
    • Reduce expenses: 90% indicated SLOs saved their company money.

    Final Thoughts

    More teams are tracking service-level objectives than ever before. And most companies (71%) that aren’t using SLOs now plan on adopting them soon. The data demonstrated that the observability market is an evolving area with room to grow. And, the same can be said about the SRE role.

    Yet, it’s good to point out that not all companies will adopt precisely the same roles or monitoring procedures. Therefore, there will likely continue to be variance in who is using SLOs and how they are applied. Regardless, the study suggested that investigating SLOs has the potential to benefit the software life cycle in many ways.

    The study, “Adoption of SLOs Grow to Increase Visibility and Drive Business Improvements” surveyed 309 participants around the globe in various sectors. The study was sponsored by Nobl9 and conducted by Dimensional Research. For more information, you can download the report here.

  • Nobl9 Shares SLO-as-Code Methodology

    Nobl9 Shares SLO-as-Code Methodology

    Nobl9 has released version 1.0 of an open specification for defining service level objectives, dubbed OpenSLO, and, in addition, has defined a repeatable SLO methodology.

    Kit Merker, Nobl9 COO, said the Service Level Objective Development Lifecycle (SLODC) methodology represents an effort to create a set of best practices for achieving and maintaining SLOs that are implemented as code within an application environment.

    A survey of more than 300 IT managers and executives conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Nobl9 found only 29% of respondents had no plans to implement SLOs. A full 94% of respondents that have or plan to implement SLOs intend to map them directly to business operations, with 91% reporting they expect that effort to improve decision-making. More than 80% also said their organizations are planning to increase the use of SLOs, with 87% indicating SLOs should improve overall microservices performance.

    The challenge is that most organizations have limited visibility into their IT environments. The survey, for example, found less than half of respondents (46%) had visibility into all their IT environments. Only 45% and 35% claim to have visibility into containers and microservices, respectively. More than three-quarters (78%) said hybrid clouds make observability more difficult.

    Ironically, 45% of companies reported they already employed 11 or more observability and monitoring tools. On the plus side, 31% have hired site reliability engineers (SREs), while nearly half (46%) planned to create that role.

    Nobl9 is trying to spur greater adoption of SLOs by making available an open source SLO specification that defines a common interface for constructing SLOs across a Git-based workflow. Since OpenSLO was initially launched, more capabilities have been added including a DataSource object that makes it easier to reuse connection details and which makes creating SLOs less verbose and three alerts have been defined: AlertCondition, AlertPolicy and AlertNotifcationTarget.

    Nobl9 is also releasing an OpenSLO-to-Nobl9 converter to transition OpenSLO YAML files into Nobl9 YAML when required.

    SLOs, of course, are not a new idea. They have been employed as a metric to track the performance of IT services for decades. However, as more microservices-based applications are built and deployed, it’s becoming more challenging to maintain SLOs across applications that have many more dependencies than legacy monolithic applications. Ultimately, each IT team needs to provide some sort of objective benchmark that assesses their overall effectiveness at delivering application services. SLO-as-code is intended to make it simpler to gather the metrics that confirm whether service levels are being achieved. Those SLOs are then tracked and integrated across everything from financial operations to supply chains, noted Mercer.

    It’s not clear to whether reliance on SLOs has waned over the years or if application environments simply became too complex to track meaningful metrics. However, as applications are increasingly viewed as services, it’s now only a matter of time before SLOs become more widely adopted across a modern application environment. The challenge, of course, is that defining an SLO is a lot easier than maintaining it—especially within today’s highly dynamic application environments where services tend to come, change and eventually go unexpectedly.

  • Service Level Objectives – Techstrong TV

    Service Level Objectives – Techstrong TV

    Service Level Objectives (SLOs) are being more widely discussed as they provide a clear path to delivering exceptional results by defining clear reliability goals. Kit provides updates on the community, use cases and best practices. The video and a transcript of the conversation are below.

    Recording:              This is Digital Anarchist.

     

    Alan Shimel:            Hey everyone. Welcome to another Techstrong TV segment. I’m really happy to have my friend Kit Merker all done up in his Seattle Kraken hat and his winter beard for the pacific northwest up there joining us today. Ken of course is the COO of Nobl9, a recent winner of the devops dozen awards as best new company on the devops space. Hey Kit. Welcome to Techstrong TV.

     

    Kit Merker:             Hey Alan. Great to see you.

     

    Shimel:            It’s good to see you again my friend. I’m thinking Kit we may actually see each other in person soon. I’m hoping.

     

    Merker:             Wouldn’t that be great? Hopefully somewhere sunny and I can get rid of the beard.

     

    Shimel:            Well I’ll tell you. I was just looking at airfare for Valencia, Spain for Cube Con in May. I don’t know if you guys are planning on being there for that one, if that’s like a CNCF thing you go to or what or – actually we have a road show coming up in Seattle at some point. I’m not sure when. We’ll talk about that.

     

    Merker:             Well in May I’m not sure about Cube Con but we will be having SLO Con and we’re doing it online again this year in May so that’s what I’m looking forward to.

     

    Shimel:            Yes. I think I saw that. What are the dates?

     

    Merker:             It’s May 9th through 12th. And that will be completely online and asynchronous and attend while you work just like last year. So we’ll have tons of speakers and all the fun from last year that we had and hopefully even bigger. The CFP is open right now so if you go to slowconf.com you can submit a talk. And it’s going to be exciting. And you guys covered the, were a media sponsor last year so hopefully we’ll have you back.

     

    Shimel:            Yes, we were.

     

    Merker:             Not to put you on the spot.

     

    Shimel:            I remember. We’ll talk about it.

     

    Merker:             All right.

     

    Shimel:            So that works out well because I think Cube Con if I’m not mistaken is like May 16th.

     

    Merker:             Yeah. We intentionally didn’t put it the same dates so.

     

    Shimel:            Yeah. So that will work. Cool man. Let’s talk a little Nobl9 though.  I guess we really shouldn’t. I’m assuming everyone knows who Nobl9 is. But I forget you’ve still only been around two, what, two, three years and at most. And not everyone may be familiar. Why don’t we back up and start there?

     

    Merker:             Sure.

     

    Shimel:            Tell people about Nobl9.

     

    Merker:             Of course. Yeah. So Nobl9 we make a service level objective platform, SLOs. And the whole idea of SLOs is about measuring your observability system and bringing new context, shared context so that you can make better decisions and better automation within your organization. So if you think about how you’re pulled in all these different directions, right? Some people on your team say we’ve got to ship features. Some people say if we don’t make it reliable and perfect then we’re going to hurt our reputation. If we don’t fix our tech deck we’re going to burn out all of our employees and we’ll have the great resignation to deal with. They’re all getting pulled in all these different directions.

     

    And what’s interesting about this is that we have actually more data about our software than we’ve ever had before. We have source control. We’ve got our AWS Cloud. We’ve got our Kubernetes cluster. We’ve got all these observability tools. We have so much data and yet we come to these different conclusions about what we should work on. And this is a big problem for so many organizations. So what Nobl9 is doing is we’re bringing some additional context. This is what’s really missing is people need to understand in an organization what are the risks to the system. What are the expectations that customers have and what are the tradeoffs we have to make in order to deliver the right kind of service to our customers?

     

    So what we’re doing with service level objectives in Nobl9 d is we collect all this observability data, we add this context and we drive automation and decisions so that whether you’re on call, you’re planning your future roadmap or trying to justify your investments you can see exactly what the impact is on the business and everybody can start pulling in the same direction. And that’s really what we’re doing. And like you said we’ve been around for a couple years. We now have a product in market. We both have kind of an entry level thing called Hydrogen, an enterprise class product that’s being used by some of the world’s largest enterprises and it’s very exciting and we’re having a great time.

     

    Shimel:            Very cool. Kit when we look over the evolution of the last couple years, right, ‘cause I remember with Nobl9, right, we first thought of it around well this is an SRE kind of thing. Right?

     

    Merker:             Yeah.

     

    Shimel:            And SREs early on were inherited a world of SLAs. Right? Where it was perform or a quick bullet to the back of the head will work.

     

    Merker:             Metaphorically speaking.

     

    Shimel:            But that wasn’t a very forgiving model or a model that would really kind of foster cooperation and team building and a lot of the principles behind devops, right, about how we get stuff done. It’s very hard to have a blameless postmortem when if you blew an SLA someone’s job is on the line. Right?

     

    Merker:             Well it’s really interesting because I think definitely in the sort of earlier I would say IT service model, right, where you have SLAs, especially if you have maybe outsource contracts. Right? SLAs became really a form of punishment. Right? One of the interesting things that I learned from sort of the Google SLA model is that there’s an assumption of reliability at Google, an assumption of infrastructure investment that’s not actually there in most enterprises. The SLOs that are prescribed by the SREs in the Google model are really trying to hold back over investment in infrastructure and this sort of gold plate infrastructure problem. Well most companies in the real world.

     

    Shimel:            It’s the other way.

     

    Merker:             It’s the other way around. Their issue is they can’t keep up with the reliability needs and the feature pressure is really the issue that they have. And so with this SLO model and being able to define them in fine grained ways across multiple data sources, being able to use it with automation. What changes is that you can start to put guardrails around these different conditions that people care about. You start to model the business. And this is really what we’ve got to get to. It’s about building the technology for digital business because all the businesses are digital now. Right?

     

    Shimel:            Right.

     

    Merker:             So you’re point about kind of like how you adopted sort of like devops method and bring this to the table, I mean really devops is trying to get better at building software, become more kind of diligent and efficient and make the right tradeoffs. It’s about ownership, right, a sense of responsibility but not punishment. And I think once people realize – actually I just had this customer from Flexera. We just did this testimonial video together. And he said it’s like once people realize that they weren’t building SLOs to point blame at them or punish them, that we were trying to do it to help them so that the people in the organization could see when they had problems, right, when they needed help.

     

    Then people really got open to this idea. This to me this is the game changer. If we can help organizations become more transparent, to be able to do more through APIs instead of meetings if you know what I mean. Right? Like using the data and the systems to help make these better decisions. This is what changes culture. A lot of people want to talk about reliability culture and devops culture and agile culture but that’s such a scary idea. The way I like to think about this and what we’ve talked about with our customers and community members is it’s about how you make decisions together. Right?

     

    And if you can make lots of decisions in a way that is supportive of the strategy, supportive of the business and also the realities of the pressures that we’re on as humans. And let’s not forget that everybody is going through a hard time and maybe not totally happy being on call and all these other things. Taking all that into account and making a decision together this is what becomes culture, not the other way around. Right? You don’t change culture first to get the decisions. You start making good decisions and then the culture emerges from that. And that’s I think a really important idea.

     

    Shimel:            I agree with you 100 percent. No doubt about it. And it is. But when we focus on devops being about delivering software and clearly that’s the goal. Right? Delivering software better, faster, higher quality. In order to do that you need just that whole culture thing. And some people say oh culture is BS. It’s not. Having a team that works together, having goals that are clearly enunciated, right, we’re all trying to do – you understand what the guy or gal next to you is doing. Right? And why they’re doing it and how you fit into it. That’s all part of that. All of those things help you get software better, faster, higher quality. And that’s where it is.

     

     What’s interesting about Nobl9 Kit from where I sit, right, because I sit – I mean beyond being on different sides of the continent I sit in a different chair than you. I get to look at the whole market without a horse in the race so to speak. You guys have done a really great job of defining and owning SLOs. Right? I think for a lot of people in the marketplace, right, SLOs aren’t necessarily synonymous with Nobl9. But you’ve probably done more to promote SLOs and their use and why they’re beneficial than anybody else in market.

     

    Merker:             Well first of all I appreciate that a lot. Personally I think it’s a reflection of the community. I think it’s a reflection of a nerve that we hit at some level. Because to your point, right, goals that are well enunciated and it’s funny to me because I think oftentimes we think of goals as things that are kind of squishy. Right? We set stretch goals – oh sorry. I thought I muted everything.

     

    Shimel:            It’s never all muted.

     

    Merker:             We’re all muted. We want to set goals. Sometimes they’re a little squishy is what I was saying. So it’s like maybe you have OKRs. Maybe you have stretch goals. Maybe you have some different perception of what the goal is for your service. And what SLOs are doing is turning it into pretty much the most precise type of goal you could imagine which is code, right? Like actually describing it in code and something that’s checked in where it’s the truth. There’s no arguing about what it is. Now we can change it, right? We can always change our minds about what the goal is. But at any given point in time there is a goal that’s described and there’s a set of actions associated with that goal. And to me this is exactly what is so attractive to people in the market about SLOs because they’re no longer guessing.

     

    They’re no longer sending each other Slacks and emails and writing documents and putting it in dashboards. They have a very precise way of describing what they want and expect from their service that takes in account the risks and tradeoffs and customer expectations that they have for the service and then allowing the team to engineer to that goal, allowing the business to understand the tradeoffs. Right? Hey. If you want the service to be faster we’re going to have to spend more to buy more computing power. Right? Hey. If you want these features we’re going to have to put these other reliability concerns on hold and vice versa. This is something that brings visibility to all the little engineering decisions that are made on a daily basis and then aggregates them up to the size of an entire enterprise ‘cause it’s birds eye view of how the enterprise functions and doesn’t limit them to a prescriptive way. ‘Cause I think this is one of the other big challenges.

     

    When I look at the observability space or anybody’s infrastructure space is trying to bring a prescriptive guidance. I think today’s world is about the right tool for the job. Right? You’ve got to fit inside of an ecosystem whether that’s what language you use, what CICD system you use, what package manager you use, what source control you use. All these things are choices that engineering teams have to make for themselves. And you can’t necessarily dictate that Team A and Team B are going to agree on that stack if you will. Right? You give them some flexibility. But what you can get them to agree on is the concept of the service level objective. Like what should my service provide to customers in terms of availability, latency, performance, throughput, whatever the characteristics are that deliver that end to end service.

     

    This is what becomes almost the contract because if I know that I’m using your service and you’re going to give me x number of latency over y number of nines then I can build my system to account for it. I can decide what my retry strategy is, what my caching strategy is. Right? I can design and engineer a system that takes into account what your service says it’s going to do. Well that level of clarity allows engineering teams to operate in a completely fundamentally different way because now they aren’t guessing and they’re not hoping and they’re not wishing. Right? They’re working toward a clearly articulated goal. And I think this is what’s so important. So now the whole idea of us promoting this concept. I mean we’re just like we’re in love with SLOs. I mean I don’t know how else to explain that. Like we’re just like losing our mind about how amazing it is.

     

    But it is really about the community. We now have literally thousands of people that are involved in the SLO, the SLO Conf community. We have the monthly meetups. The conference as I mentioned will be in May. And we’re expecting hopefully about 5,000 people to show up this year. Last year we had 2,200 registrations. So we’re pushing hard for this but based on what we’ve seen in the market and the companies that are literally deciding if they’re going to build or buy an SLO platform right now.

     

    There is a huge groundswell of interest in this concept to take their observability systems, their operation systems, reliability systems to the next level. And all the practices and tools and techniques and tricks everybody wants to share it and learn together which is I think the most exciting thing. And it fits in with so many other areas, incident response and chaos engineering and how we do monitoring and logs. All this stuff kind of fits into this whole story about SLOs. Even finops, right, even like cost management, all this stuff fits into this same story. So yeah. It’s kind of overwhelming to be honest how much the market seems to have appeared and materialized over the last couple of years with SLOs.

     

    Shimel:            Cool man. Hey Kit, we’re up on the clock here. So you mentioned SLO Con and SLOconf with an F dot com. Right?

     

    Merker:             That’s right.

     

    Shimel:            Right.

     

    Merker:             Yep.

     

    Shimel:            For people who want to maybe submit a talk or just find out more about attending this year’s virtual conference in early May. And then for people wanting to get more information on Nobl9 is it Nobl9 dot com or IO? I forget.

     

    Merker:             Nobl9.com. Yeah. N-O-B-L number 9, dot com.

     

    Shimel:            That’s it. Hey Kit, man. It’s great seeing you. I hope to see you in person sooner than later here. But keep doing what you’re doing man and congratulations on the devops dozen award as well.

     

    Merker:             Thank you so much Alan and hopefully we’ll catch a hockey game together.

     

    Shimel:            Come on down. Actually I don’t have Seattle Sounder tickets when they’re playing the Panthers but we’ll look into it. I’ll talk to you later man.

     

    Merker:             All right..

     

    Shimel:            Great seeing you.

     

    Merker:             All right. Take care Alan.

     

    Shimel:            All right. Bye bye.

     

    Merker:             Bye.

     

    [End of Audio]

  • Nobl9 Adds Hydrogen Platform to Surface Technical Debt Issues

    Nobl9 Adds Hydrogen Platform to Surface Technical Debt Issues

    Nobl9 today unveiled a Hydrogen platform that makes it simpler for DevOps teams to identify technical debt issues as they manage service level objectives (SLOs) as code.

    Hydrogen enables DevOps teams to define SLOs using a simple wizard or by embedding code within their application as part of a DevOps workflow. That code is then used to automatically collect data from platforms such as Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Splunk and others with requiring any additional instrumentation.

    Nobl9 COO Kit Merker said that approach also makes it possible to surface technical debt that inhibits achieving those goals via the Hydrogen platform. Armed with those insights, it then becomes easier for DevOps teams to focus on reducing or eliminating that technical debt because Hydrogen automatically generates a ticket in the Jira project management application—widely used by DevOps teams—to make sure the issue is addressed. Otherwise, in the heat of a DevOps sprint, the issue is likely to be forgotten as the application development project continues to move forward, noted Merker.

    The ability to identify that technical debt is an outgrowth of the ability to manage SLOs as code that is enabled by the core Nobl9 software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform. Hydrogen extends that capability by automating workflows whenever a specific service shows indications that it cannot meet objectives because of a dependency on a legacy platform that needs to be upgraded, added Merker.

    There is also a service health dashboard that organizes SLOs into logical groups that are mapped to features via labels, which Merker noted makes it possible for multiple stakeholders to easily identify which issues affect a particular service most. Hydrogen can also trigger a variety of automated workflows to prompt additional investigations that escalate as services worsen.

    Overall, Hydrogen is designed to provide engineering teams with more accurate context that can be used to prioritize which issues should be addressed first during any technical debt planning cycle, said Merker. Hydrogen can enforce code release policies based on technical debt budgets that are enforced via integrations with continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms.

    Technical debt generally refers to any code change that is required to optimize a service that is not immediately addressed. The more legacy platforms there are in an IT environment, the higher that technical debt tends to become. At a time when more organizations are building and deploying microservices-based applications, that technical debt, over time, tends to adversely affect applications that are much more dependent on external services than a traditional monolithic application. A single technical debt issue can have a cascading impact on multiple microservices-based applications that would, otherwise, would be difficult to detect.

    The challenge, of course, is that technical debt doesn’t always get the attention it deserves when most of the IT team is focused on rolling out the next great application. However, as application environments become more complex it may only be a matter of time before all the technical debt that is being accumulated becomes unsustainable.

  • Nobl9 Secures $21 Million in Series B Funding; Flagship SLO Platform Enters GA

    Led by Battery and CRV, the round green lights go-to-market and engineering expansion for the first infrastructure operations platform focused on the fast-growing market for SLO management.

    SANTA MONICA, Calif. — February 10, 2021 — Nobl9, the software reliability platform company, has secured $21 million in Series B funding and launched its flagship product to define the landscape of the next major innovation in cloud infrastructure operations. The round is led by Series A investors Battery Ventures and CRV. Series A investors Bonfire Ventures and Resolute Ventures are also participating, along with new investors Harmony Partners and Sorenson Ventures. Proceeds from the Series B will fund programs focused on customer deployment success, software engineering team expansion and marketing programs.

    “Every CEO who is serious about SRE understands that SLOs are the answer to customer demands for more reliable software,” said Marcin Kurc, co-founder and CEO of Nobl9. “End-users want reliable software that meets their expectations for availability and performance. CEOs realize software reliability is central to business performance and profitability. Our platform is exactly what those enterprises need to build the feedback loops that are critical to sustainably running reliable, modern software.”

    General Availability of Nobl9 SLO Platform Announced

    The company announced the general availability of its Nobl9 Service Level Objective (SLO) Platform last week. The Nobl9 SLO platform is the first SLO-centric operations platform purpose-built to drive widespread adoption of SLOs. Users can easily balance infrastructure reliability with the rapid release of software enhancements, while optimizing productivity and controlling infrastructure costs. The launch comes after a successful beta program that began last year.

    The company already has more than 50 organizations on the platform from diverse market verticals including financial services, communications, ecommerce and media. Users include Adobe—which recently gave a presentation describing its use of the Nobl9 SLO Platform—and Brex.

    Start a free trial of the Nobl9 SLO Platform today, and read co-founder and chief product officer Brian Singer’s blog post about the product launch.

    “In the last year we’ve seen a rapid change in the mindset of almost every enterprise. Modern software architectures have accelerated a shift in their approach to operating production software,” said Brian Singer, co-founder and chief product officer. “Our beta users rely on SLOs, and Nobl9 is serving a critical role in their production stack. This round of funding gives us the resources to bring our offering to every organization that understands the importance of building reliability into their DNA.”

    Leadership in Emerging Category

    Battery Ventures is a global, technology-focused investment firm pursuing the most promising companies and ideas. The firm partners with exceptional founders and management teams to develop category-defining businesses in markets including software and services, enterprise infrastructure, online marketplaces, healthcare IT and industrial technology.

    “SRE is rapidly changing how app devs and infrastructure operators work together,” said Alex Benik, partner at Battery Ventures. “Enterprise DevOps teams want a solution for SLO management that dovetails with their existing infrastructure investments. The Nobl9 team has built the right product at the right time for this fundamental market shift, and they’ve brought it to market faster than anyone expected.”

    CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage enterprise, consumer and biotech startups. Since 1970, the firm has invested in more than 400 startups at their most crucial stages, including DoorDash, Twitter, Zendesk, Airtable, Patreon, Cybereason, Drift, Kong and Iterable.

    “Software reliability is the next outsized growth opportunity in the infrastructure market, and what Nobl9 has delivered is perfectly situated in a market that’s growing and changing rapidly,” said Murat Bicer, general partner at CRV. “We see the trend toward SRE accelerating over the next few years and Nobl9 is leading that transition.”

    The Nobl9 Service Level Objective Platform

    The Nobl9 SLO Platform helps organizations use SLOs to efficiently deliver software reliability. Nobl9 works with existing monitoring systems and other data sources to collect metrics that are measured against business-justified reliability targets to clarify and limit the cost of reliability. Nobl9 calculates budgets of acceptable error per service threshold and can trigger workflows and alerts in anticipation of outages. This system helps software and business teams together deliver reliable features faster and at a reasonable cost.

    The Nobl9 SLO Platform lets technology executives look at their engineering culture and system holistically by providing a central system-of-record for service ownership, reliability goals, and the historical track record of service health. The platform gives a strategic view of how to best run services to optimize for the critical tradeoffs: speed of delivery, technical debt, and redundant infrastructure cost.

    SLOs create a balanced and scalable relationship between operational staff (who are primarily focused on reliability) and software services staff (who are primarily focused on quickly releasing new software features)—all while maintaining customer loyalty and avoiding unnecessary costs. By fine-tuning SLOs that correlate with business objectives, organizations gain a clearer picture of where to spend resources: delivering new features or paying down technical debt.

    About Nobl9

    Nobl9, the software reliability platform company, is in the noble pursuit of reliable software. Founded by Marcin Kurc and Brian Singer, who joined Google via acquisition of Orbitera, Nobl9 helps software developers, DevOps practitioners, and reliability engineers deliver reliable features faster through software-defined Service Level Objectives that link monitoring and other logging and tracing data to user happiness and business KPIs. The company is backed by Battery Ventures, CRV, Bonfire, Harmony, Resolute, and Sorenson and is headquartered in Boston with a distributed team. More at nobl9.com and at the Nobl9 free resource library.

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  • Nobl9 and Lightstep Partner to Integrate Distributed Tracing Technology into SLO Management Platform

    Joint development effort to help engineers use real-time distributed data to design better SLOs and monitor software performance for better end-user experiences.
    BOSTON and SAN FRANCISCO, November 5, 2020 — Nobl9, a Boston-based software reliability platform startup, and Lightstep, the San Francisco-based observability company that has pioneered the cutting-edge practice of ‘distributed tracing,’ today announced an integration partnership in which the two companies will add support for the Lightstep core distributed tracing technology to Nobl9’s SLO platform. The effort enables organizations to establish service level objectives from performance data captured through distributed traces in the Lightstep platform.
    Distributed tracing, the technology at the heart of the Lightstep observability platform, is used to rapidly pinpoint the causes of failures and poor performance across the deeply complex dependencies among services, teams and workloads in modern production systems. SLOs—service level objectives—are strong, understandable goals that applications will run reliably and with adequate performance. What makes SLOs uniquely valuable and powerful is that they encode technical and business priorities in terms that are easy to understand, built by a collaborative team of application developers, product managers, IT operators and other business stakeholders. Using distributed tracing data as an input to the SLO process gives application developers and operators the ability to construct SLOs that reflect service dependencies and validate them with live telemetry from the application.
    Users of services—whether they are human or other services—have expectations about how reliable these services are, and those expectations vary by the types of services being requested, the time of day or year those services are being requested, and how reliable similar services are from competitors. Good SLOs are built on the economic value to the organization of successful service delivery. The Nobl9 platform, presently in private beta, democratizes the process of managing SLOs so that engineers can make objective reliability decisions based on data, not conjecture or organizational folklore. When SLOs are at risk, Lightstep provides explanations of what has changed to help engineers get things back on track.
    “In order for software to fulfill its promise as the only sustainable source of competitive differentiation, it has to be reliable,” said Marcin Kurc, CEO of Nobl9. “Site reliability engineering is the means by which reliable software is built and run, and SLOs are the foundation upon which SRE is built. That’s what we’re creating at Nobl9: a platform to help organizations create and manage SLOs that deliver positive reliability experience downstream, without over-provisioning or other capital-inefficient tactics that deliver negative ROI for the organization.”
    “Engineers in charge of delivering reliable software crave management systems that are elegant, flexible and save them time,” said Ben Sigelman, CEO and cofounder at Lightstep. “Engineers don’t want another maintenance headache, and they don’t want another framework or vendor that makes them bend over backwards. Lightstep and Nobl9 see the world the same way, and by integrating our systems, we’re giving our customers access to another, powerful value proposition for distributed tracing.”
    The integration will be made available to participants in the private beta program for the Nobl9 SLO platform.
    About Lightstep
    Lightstep’s mission is to deliver confidence at scale for those who develop, operate and rely on today’s powerful software applications. Its products leverage distributed tracing technology – initially developed by a Lightstep co-founder at Google – to offer best-of-breed observability to organizations adopting microservices or serverless at scale. Lightstep is backed by Redpoint, Sequoia, Altimeter Capital, Cowboy Ventures, and Harrison Metal and is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. For more information, visit lightstep.com or follow @LightstepHQ.
    About Nobl9
    Nobl9, the software reliability platform startup, is in the noble pursuit of reliable software. Founded by Marcin Kurc and Brian Singer, who joined Google via acquisition of Orbitera, Nobl9 helps software developers, DevOps practitioners, and reliability engineers deliver reliable features faster through software-defined Service Level Objectives that link monitoring and other logging and tracing data to user happiness and business KPIs. The company is backed by Battery Ventures, CRV, Bonfire and Resolute Ventures and is headquartered in Boston with a distributed team. More at nobl9.com.
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