On this episode of the Six Five in the Booth, host Paul Nashawaty is joined by Flexera’s Kristian Dell’Orso, Vice President, Site Reliability Engineering & Site Leader, highlighting their collaboration with Nobl9 for a conversation on becoming an SRE-driven organization. This in-depth discussion explores the transformative impact of adopting Service Level Objectives (SLOs) over traditional Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and how Flexera has shifted its approach to prioritize reliability and enhance customer experiences.
Their discussion covers:
- The transition from SLAs to SLOs at Flexera and its impact on organizational key performance indicators (KPIs), including improvements in reliability and customer experience.
- The limitations of SLAs in capturing the full spectrum of service reliability and customer satisfaction, and the move towards a more proactive and accountable approach within organizations.
- How adopting SLOs has led to consistency in measuring reliability across different groups in the company, fostering a culture of accountability and transparency.
Learn more how Nobl9 and Flexera articulates its strategy:
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Transcript:
Paul Nashawaty: Hello and welcome to our session on what it means to be an SRE-driven organization. My name is Paul Nashawaty, and I’m the practice lead and principal analyst at The Futurum Group. I’m joined by Kristian from Flexera. Kristian, would you like to introduce yourself and your role?
Kristian Dell’Orso: Hi, Paul. Yeah, I run our site reliability engineering org here at Flexera and we cover a range of activities including supporting some of our monolithic applications and modern applications as well, but security operations and compliance, just to name a few. We’re a diverse group that works across the broad Flexera teams with the sales support and product management. So yeah, that’s a little bit of us.
Paul Nashawaty: Excellent. And thank you for joining me today. This is great. And from our conversations we were talking about how Flexera has adopted a site reliability engineering strategy to really help elevate the customer experience and by leveraging Nobl9. And by shifting to this new kind of traditional Service Level Agreement, or SLAs, to a more proactive approach. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kristian Dell’Orso: Yeah. So prior to us implementing SLOs, we were heavily focused on uptime as a key measure for our system reliability. And at times this caused us some challenges because our applications may have been available, but from a customer perspective, they weren’t experiencing the level that they expected. So there was some contention between our support teams and those that were talking to customers who understood that there was some underlying issues, but the engineering teams may not be fully aware. So the shift to focusing on the customer experiences really meant that we as a broader organization are now able to really focus on the customer experience in totality when we talk about reliability and not just publishing an uptime report or something that may measure the ability to log into a system. We’re far more granular now.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, I’m hearing the same thing when I talk to organizations that have moved from SLAs to SLOs. They really are trying to get that, kind of everybody moving towards that common North star, everyone rolling in the same direction to understand where their organization is driving to, and really providing that overall customer experience. But can you explain a little bit about from the Flexera’s perspective, why SLAs were not good enough? Why didn’t it tell you that you’re getting with the SLOs?
Kristian Dell’Orso: Yeah. So in my experience, I’ve found SLAs to be a very broad metrics that cover something over a long period of time. And generally, this is uptime and it doesn’t really help an engineering or support function truly understand how an application is performing. But most importantly, they don’t tell you whether or not you’re actually delivering a good service to your customers. And also, SLAs are very much retrospective, and so you’re unable to really be proactive or truly understand how your application is performing in the moment. But ultimately you’re not really looking at the behavior of the system through the user’s eyes, whereas an SLO is far more proactive and you’re able to really see what’s happening in the moment at a far more granular level.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And when I think about this and I talk to other organizations, how did it help you with strategic decision-makings and how have executives responded to the shift to SLOs?
Kristian Dell’Orso: Yeah. So we are now able to clearly see what products, or more importantly, what components of those products are in need of attention. And in doing so, we have a data-based approach when discussing priorities with product management and therefore able to see when we need to stop focusing on new feature work and shift our focus to reliability. But on top of that, we can easily see the impacts of changes we’ve made. And when we adopt new technologies or make some system improvements, we have some clear data sets that enable us to quantify the impacts of those changes in terms of customer experience. Are we delivering a better experience to the customer and do we need to further uplift as well? So as I said before, we are able to really fine-tune and focus on the customer experience.
Paul Nashawaty: Kristian, this is great information and I know it’s just the tip of the iceberg. For the audience, if you’re looking for additional information around this, take a look at how Nobl9 and Flexera articulates the strategy by their customer testimonial on the website or the SLOconf presentation that’s available as well as the paper that supports this information as well. Kristian, I want to thank you for your time and I want to thank the audience for watching our session today. Thank you.
Kristian Dell’Orso: Thank you.
Author Information
With over 25 years of experience, Paul has a proven track record in implementing effective go-to-market strategies, including the identification of new market channels, the growth and cultivation of partner ecosystems, and the successful execution of strategic plans resulting in positive business outcomes for his clients.
