In this two for one episode recorded at HumanX, Ryan is first joined by Christine Yen, CEO of Honeycomb, to discuss how AI compresses the software development lifecycle, making observability about capturing the right telemetry. Then, Spiros Xanthos, founder and CEO of Resolve AI, shares with us how AI coding increases code volume but decreases human intuition, making production operations harder than ever.
Episode notes:
Honeycomb is an observability platform that enables deep, high-dimensional exploration so you can debug unpredictable behavior with precision.
Resolve AI allows you to resolve incidents, optimize costs, and code with production context using AI that works across your code, infrastructure, and telemetry.
Connect with Christine on LinkedIn.
Connect with Spiros on LinkedIn.
TRANSCRIPT
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Ryan is joined by Spiros Xanthos, CEO and founder of Resolve AI, to talk about the future of AI agents in incident management and troubleshooting, the challenges of maintaining complex software systems with traditional runbooks, and the changing role of developers in an AI-driven world.
Episode notes:
Resolve AI is building agents to help you troubleshoot alerts, manage incidents, and run your production systems.
Connect with Spiros on Linkedin or email him at spiros@resolve.ai.
Congrats to user larsks for winning a Stellar Answer badge for their answer to How do I get into a Docker container's shell?.
TRANSCRIPT
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Morgan McLean, co-founder of OpenTelemetry and senior director of product management at Splunk, has long tackled the challenges of observability in large-scale systems. In a conversation with Alex Williams onThe New Stack Makers, McLean reflected on his early frustrations debugging high-scale services and the need for better observability tools.
OpenTelemetry, formed in 2019 from OpenTracing and OpenCensus, has since become a key part of modern observability strategies. As a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) incubating project, it’s the second most active open source project after Kubernetes, with over 1,200 developers contributing monthly. McLean highlighted OpenTelemetry’s role in solving scaling challenges, particularly in Kubernetes environments, by standardizing distributed tracing, application metrics, and data extraction.
Looking ahead, profiling is set to become the fourth major observability signal alongside logs, tracing, and metrics, with general availability expected in 2025. McLean emphasized ongoing improvements, including automation and ease of adoption, predicting even faster OpenTelemetry adoption as friction points are resolved.
Learn more from The New Stack about the latest trends in Open Telemetry:
What Is OpenTelemetry? The Ultimate Guide
Observability in 2025: OpenTelemetry and AI to Fill In Gaps
Honeycomb.io’s Austin Parker: OpenTelemetry In-Depth
Join our community of newsletter subscribers to stay on top of the news and at the top of your game.
SaaStr 778: How to Leverage Pricing and Packaging to Drive Growth, Revenue, and Profit with Miro, Loom, OpenAI, and Splunk
Pricing is more than just a number on a contract — when used thoughtfully, it can become a strategic tool for your SaaS product that can drive product adoption, customer satisfaction, and business growth. At this year's SaaStr Annual AI Summit, Akshay Sharma, Head of Pricing and Monetization at Miro, chats with a panel of experts, including Janie Lee, Head of Product at Loom, Alison Harmon, Head of Growth at OpenAI, and Carsten Holm, VP of Pricing and Monetization at Splunk, about their nuanced approach to pricing and monetization.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.
Hey everybody - thanks to the 10,000 of you who came out to SaaStr Annual. We had a blast and big news -- we'll be back in MAY of 2025. That's right, the SaaStr Annual will be a bit earlier next year, May 13-15 2025. We'll still be back in the same venue, in the SF bay area at the 40+ acre sprawling san mateo county events center. Grab your tickets at saastrannual.com with code JASON50 for an extra discount on our very best pricing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This episode is sponsored by: Anrok
A question for SaaS finance leaders, do you know where your customers are? Anrok tracks where your sales are creating exposure, and automates tax calculation and filing worldwide. Built for high-growth software companies, Anrok protects your revenue and saves you time. Visit anrok.com/saastr to learn more.
SaaStr 720: CRO Confidential: What It Really Takes to Be Successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales with Christian Smith, CRO of Splunk. Hosted by Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund
In this week's episode of CRO Confidential, Sam Blond, Partner at Founders Fund and former CRO at Brex, sits down with the CRO of Splunk, Christian Smith. Splunk is a 20-year-old Enterprise software giant that has accomplished many things — a 2012 IPO, a $28B+ Cisco acquisition in 2023, and $3.7 billion of ARR last year, with a market cap of $25.7 Billion.
Splunk's core product is a platform for collecting and analyzing high volumes of machine-generated data. Over the years, Splunk has expanded its offerings through acquisitions and product development. As Christian shares on the pod, the company's current customer list includes many notable companies, with 92 of them being on the Fortune 100. A feat!
As Christian's been the CRO of Splunk for over seven years now, he's a wealth of knowledge on what it really takes to be successful in Enterprise SaaS Sales.
Together with Sam, in today's episode, they discuss everything Enterprise SaaS sales including:
Pipeline health
Enterprise pipeline generation
How to create demand in the Enterprise when new business slows
The pros and cons of a product-led pipeline
And of course, Customer Success with Enterprise-level customers
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SaaStr hosts the largest SaaS community events on the planet.
Join us in 2024 at:
SaaStr Annual: Sept. 10-12 in the SF Bay Area. Join 12,500 SaaS professionals, CEOs, revenue leaders and investors for the world's LARGEST SaaS community event of the year. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on tickets here: https://www.saastrannual2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave20
SaaStr Europa: June 5-6 in London. We'll be hosting the 5th SaaStr Europa in London for two days of content and networking. Join 3,000 SaaS and Cloud leaders. Podcast listeners can grab a discount on Europa tickets here: https://www.saastreuropa2024.com/buy-tickets?promo=fave200
--------------
This episode is sponsored by: Northwest Registered Agent
When starting your business, it's important to use a service that will actually help you. Northwest Registered Agent is that service. They'll form your company fast, give you the documents you need to open a business bank account, and even provide you with mail scanning and a business address to keep your personal privacy intact. Visit https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/saastr to get a 60 percent discount on your next LLC.
OpenTelemetry project offers vendor-neutral integration points that help organizations obtain the raw materials — the "telemetry" — that fuel modern observability tools, and with minimal effort at integration time. But what does OpenTelemetry mean for those who use their favorite observability tools but don’t exactly understand how it can help them? How might OpenTelemetry be relevant to the folks who are new to Kuberentes (the majority of KubeCon attendees during the past years) and those who are just getting started with observability?
Austin Parker, head of developer relations, Lightstep and Morgan McLean, director of product management, Splunk, discuss during this podcast at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022 how the OpenTelemetry project has created demo services to help cloud native community members better understand cloud native development practices and test out OpenTelemetry, as well as Kubernetes, observability software, etc.
At this conjecture in DevOps history, there has been considerable hype around observability for developers and operations teams, and more recently, much attention has been given to helping combine the different observability solutions out there in use through a single interface, and to that end, OpenTelemetry has emerged as a key standard.
DevOps teams today need OpenTelemetry since they typically work with a lot of different data sources for observability processes, Parker said. “If you want observability, you need to transform and send that data out to any number of open source or commercial solutions and you need a lingua franca to to be consistent. Every time I have a host, or an IP address, or any kind of metadata, consistency is key and that's what OpenTelemetry provides.”
Additionally, as a developer or an operator, OpenTelemetry serves to instrument your system for observability, McLean said. “OpenTelemetry does that through the power of the community working together to define those standards and to provide the components needed to extract that data among hundreds of thousands of different combinations of software and hardware and infrastructure that people are using,” McLean said.
Observability and OpenTelemetry, while conceptually straightforward, do require a learning curve to use. To that end, the OpenTelemetry project has released a demo to help. It is intended to both better understand cloud native development practices and to test out OpenTelemetry, as well as Kubernetes, observability software, etc.,the project’s creators say.
OpenTelemetry Demo v1.0 general release is available on GitHub and on the OpenTelemetry site. The demo helps with learning how to add instrumentation to an application to gather metrics, logs and traces for observability. There is heavy instruction for open source projects like Prometheus for Kubernetes and Jaeger for distributed tracing. How to acquaint yourself with tools such as Grafana to create dashboards are shown. The demo also extends to scenarios in which failures are created and OpenTelemetry data is used for troubleshooting and remediation. The demo was designed for the beginner or the intermediate level user, and can be set up to run on Docker or Kubernetes in about five minutes.
“The demo is a great way for people to get started,” Parker said. “We've also seen a lot of great uptake from our commercial partners as well who have said ‘we'll use this to demo our platform.’”
Doug Merritt joins this episode on the tail end of his impressive run as Splunk’s CEO. With decades of leadership in what can be described as an “exploratory career,” Doug breaks down his professional roadmap and provides insight on how he was able to transform companies and the cultures that hold them together.
In this episode, Doug shares his perspective on the new wave of innovation as a seasoned executive and how he stays relevant in a “world of teenagers.” He talks about his 8-year evolution at Splunk and the incredible companies he’s helped grow. Doug discusses founding his first company, Icarian, and why he has always wanted to be an entrepreneur. Through his endeavors, Doug has always stayed balanced and expounds on how he masters his personal and professional habits. Doug also shares his take on the influence of technology and the future of web 3.0.
In this episode, we cover:
3 habits Doug formed as a child to cope with his frequent moves to new locations—all before he reached the 8th grade. (5:32)
The story behind Doug’s bike ride up Mount Aspen during the Kleiner Perkins CEO Summit. (15:07)
A discussion about connectivity and how COVID has affected Doug and Joubin’s attachment to their physical location. (18:30)
Doug’s time at Oracle and his journey into sales - Doug defines the important qualities of a good sales rep. (28:00)
The history of Icarian and why Doug was inspired to found the startup - and a look at Doug’s transition to PeopleSoft. (38:46)
Doug’s evolution at Splunk, from SVP to CEO, and the board pitch that got him there. (49:03)
How Doug inspired confidence after taking the CEO position, an exploration of Splunk’s revenue valley of death, and how Doug cultivates positive self-talk. (57:29)
Doug reflects on previous chapters of his career and gives perspective on what’s to come - plus his overview of web 1.0 to 3.0. (01:08:03)
Links:
Connect with DougLinkedIn
Splunk
Connect with JoubinTwitter
LinkedIn
Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
You can read more about Spiros on his LinkedIn or Twitter.
There is some good backstory on his first company, Log Insight, here. A rundown of the acquisition that led to Spiros joining Splunk is here. There are also some interesting details in Splunk's blog on the deal, which calls out Omnition as a "a stealth-mode SaaS company that is innovating in distributed tracing, improving monitoring across microservices applications."
If you enjoy the conversation and want to hear more, Spiros has done some interesting talks that are up on Youtube here.
Our lifeboat of the week goes to Willie Mentzel, who explains how to: Round Double to 1 decimal place in kotlin: from 0.044999 to 0.1.
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Constance Caramanolis is the co-chair of this week's virtual KubeCon EU, and a principal software engineer at Splunk. Her introduction to Cloud Native came as an Envoy maintainer working at Lyft; she talks to Craig and Adam about communication: techmical, programmatic, in-person and online. We also summarise all the news from KubeCon.
Do you have something cool to share? Some questions? Let us know:
web: kubernetespodcast.com
mail: kubernetespodcast@google.com
twitter: @kubernetespod
Chatter of the week KubeCon EU
#kubernetes-podcast on CNCF Slack
Get an invite to Slack
Hamilton (musical) Watch on Disney Plus
News of the week Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization is GA Red Hat news summary from SiliconAngle
5 years of Google Kubernetes Engine Announcement post from 2015
GKE Dataplane v2
Docker changes registry pricing and retention Hacker News commentary
IBM introduced POWER10
Introducing hierarchical namespaces by Adrian Ludwin
OpenEBS 2.0.0
containerd 1.4.0
VMware Tanzu Mission Control integrates VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront
Mirantis acquires Lens Episode 110, with Adrian Ionel
Pulumi adds new Kubernetes features
Links from the interview Envoy
Omnition, acquired by Splunk
Splunk acquires Omnition
OpenTelemetry Collector
Constance's talks:
KubeCon NA 2018: Envoy Intro (with Matt Klein)
Velocity 2018: Leveraging Envoy when responding to high-severity incidents
SYN-ACK
Constance's KubeCon EU keynote
The Five Whys
KubeCon EU agenda
KubeCon NA 2019 puppies
Corgis
Invite a llama
Episode 80, with Vicki Cheung
Greek food: Galaktoboureko
Loukoumades
Stroopwafels
Poutine
Constance Caramanolis on Twitter