On this episode of DevOps Dialogues: Insights & Innovations, I am joined by Chronosphere’s CEO, Martin Mao, for discussion of the partnership with CrowdStrike and the recent acquisition of Calyptia.
Our discussion covers:
- Chronosphere recently unveiled “Logs powered by CrowdStrike,” a comprehensive log storage and visualization solution, and how embedding CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale within Chronosphere’s cloud-native observability platform helps clients
- Chronosphere’s recently acquisition of Calyptia, founded by the original creators of the Fluent Ecosystem
- What’s next for Chronosphere, and the next sets of advancements in the observability and security space
- Cloud native coming off Kubecon
These topics reflect ongoing discussions, challenges, and innovations within the DevOps community.
Watch the video below, and be sure to subscribe to our YouTube channel, so you never miss an episode.
Listen to the audio here:
Or grab the audio on your favorite audio platform below:
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this webcast. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this webcast.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
Transcript:
Paul Nashawaty: Hello, and welcome to this edition of DevOps Dialogues: Insights and Innovation. My name is Paul Nashawaty, I’m the Practice Lead for the AppDev practice at The Futurum Group. I’m joined today by Chronosphere’s CEO, Martin Mao, to talk about the recent partnership with CrowdStrike and their recent acquisition of Calyptia. But before that, Martin, let’s talk a little bit about Chronosphere. What’s that all about?
Martin Mao: Yeah, for sure. Paul, thank you for having me on the show. Chronosphere is a cloud native observability company. We provide an observability platform, you can imagine insights into your infrastructure, into your application, into your business. In particular, we provide it for companies adopting cloud native architecture or running on cloud native environments. For us, what’s different about Chronosphere is we’re really trying to solve the pain points that arise when you try to tackle observability in a cloud native environment.
Really, there’s two pain points there. One is cost: It’s very expensive to monitor and observe these cloud native environments, there’s a lot of data and the cost is pretty high, the associated cost is pretty high when it comes to observability. The second part is that these environments are pretty complex, and hence it’s much harder to solve problems and figure out what’s going on. Those are the two problems that we try to target and do a better job at, here at Chronosphere.
Paul Nashawaty: That’s really exciting. It’s really interesting, when I think about my area of coverage. I focus on day zero, day one, day two, so build, release and operations. When I think about the impact in the CIC pipeline and the impact to the devops teams and such, it really does matter about how quickly you can resolve issues and seeing how these things happen. But it also matters about the security and all the aspects that go along with it. But when we look at all the aspects of observability, as we were going through it in what Chronosphere does, this recent announcement with CrowdStrike, so you have logs powered by CrowdStrike.
It’s really catchy and it really drives to that log storage and virtualization solution that you have, which I really think is amazing. I’ve been following Chronosphere for quite some time, and I’ve loved to see your growth and where you’re going. But this embedded CrowdStrike Falcon LogScale within the Chronosphere cloud native observability platform, how does it really help your clients, and why CrowdStrike in particular?
Martin Mao: Yeah, 100%. I would say in the first part, the whole industry is moving towards a single unified platform for observability these days, whereas a few years ago, you would perhaps have a log management solution separate from your APM separate from your infrastructure monitoring software. Really, all those tools are used to solve one use case these days, so what really the industry’s looking for is all of that in one. The very first thing that this does is it helps us complete the platform by adding log management capabilities there.
In particular we chose CrowdStrike because, for our customer base, we serve some of the largest, most complex companies in the world, and they have huge scale requirements and performance requirements for their log management capabilities. For us, CrowdStrike checks those boxes extremely well. It’s highly scalable, so it can handle petabytes and petabytes of data, while also having performance against all of that data as well. For us, it was not only completing the platform, but also the right technology, the right log management technology to power that side for all of the existing Chronosphere customers and the companies that we work with.
Paul Nashawaty: It sounds interesting, and the reason it does is when I think about observability as a practice, there was a running, I call it a joke, for a while there that the observability practice was basically a glorified storage admin, because basically all they did was just collect a bunch of data and didn’t know what to do with it.
Martin Mao: Yeah.
Paul Nashawaty: You did this alerting, and monitoring, and logging, but that’s really the immature stages of observability practices. With just alerts and monitoring, you really can see what’s happening but with those actionable insights really is really what matters. When you look at it from the perspective of maturity, there is different levels of maturity within organizations, both large and small. You have SMBs or large enterprises that may have observability practices that can fully mature, taking actionable insights on everything that’s going on. Or being at the very, very early stages and saying, “Okay, well we have this red light, yellow light, green light approach that happens, and we know what’s happening but we don’t know what to do about it.”
I definitely like the CrowdStrike partnership. It definitely ties things together to do that, that logging and tracing all the way through the entire ecosystem and try to figure it out so that’s really powerful. Again, the other side of it is the actionable insights. You can feed that into the CICD pipeline very easily now, with having that information. But speaking of developers and devops and such, Calyptia, what’s all this about? You have Chronosphere, you recently acquired Calyptia. They’re the original creators of the fluent ecosystem, as you know. I don’t have to tell you that, you already know that. Why is this strategic for Chronosphere?
Martin Mao: Yeah, 100%. For those that don’t know, Calyptia provide a telemetry pipeline, so it’s the ingestion and the transformation of a lot of telemetry or observability data, including logs, and metrics, and traces, before it goes to a back end. The main reason for us to do that is, I mentioned in my introduction, that one of the problems that Chronosphere wants to solve is the cost problem of observability. It’s a huge pain point for a lot of those in the industry right now. The way for us to solve the cost problem is not by just making it cheaper, that’s a losing battle there. But for us, the way we approach it is we actually want to understand the cost of all the data and cost accounted back to an individual team or a particular use case.
That cost, by the way, is not easy to figure out. A line of instrumentation may cost you $1 million a year, that same line may cost you $1. When you’re instrumenting it, you actually don’t know how much it’s going to cost you. We show you that cost, but we also marry that cost with the value of the data. We also want you to understand how you’re using the data, and what sets of data is valuable and not valuable. You can imagine, with both sides of that equation, we can identify what’s expensive but not valuable, and help you figure out what data is and isn’t valuable to you and how much you’re spending on it. You can imagine with that data, you can go and optimize your observability costs by ideally focusing on the data that is really valuable there.
That’s what we do across the whole platform, however we just added log management capabilities. As we added log management capabilities, we also wanted to bring this control value proposition around cost onto log data as well. That’s what Calyptia really does for us, for the Chronosphere platform there, is it allows you to have that same type of concept but for the log data type as well. Now our customers can see the cost of particular logs and also start to see the value of that as well. That is through this telemetry pipeline acquisition that we made in Calyptia.
Paul Nashawaty: Yeah. Really, one other piece that you didn’t touch on a little bit, and I want to double click a little bit down on that, is the impacts to the ecosystem. Calyptia is also very broadly accepted in the open source community as well.
Martin Mao: Yeah.
Paul Nashawaty: That’s a big selling statement, especially for devops and devs and such, they want to make sure that there’s an open source project out there that’s been hardened, and tested and it works, but also with the Chronosphere backing of it, you have the enterprise level support that goes along with it. I probably didn’t want to steal your thunder there, but can you talk a little bit about that?
Martin Mao: Yeah, 100%. The founders at Calyptia also created the Fluent Bit project, which is a graduated CNCF project and it could be used to ingest, enrich, process logs, metrics, traces and various telemetry types. That project has become super popular over the last couple of years. I think in the last two years, it went from one billion downloads to 13 billion downloads. This project is literally everywhere and it’s probably the thing that’s processing and routing your log data right now. For us, to your point, it was important for us to be able to continue to invest in open source community.
Chronosphere actually has an open core nature in itself, as well, so a lot of the technologies that we build on top of at Chronosphere are open source technologies that myself and my co-founder actually built originally at Uber as well. We’ve had this theme of open source and supporting the open source community from the very beginning, and I think Calyptia only continues that into the fluent side as well. We’re looking forward to continuing to support and I would say additionally support even further, the fluent community now as part of this acquisition.
Paul Nashawaty: Martin, do you see this as, and I’m going to lead into it a little bit, but as a major differentiator in the market? The reason why I say that is because you see a lot of shifts that have been happening, a lot of acquisitions that are occurring, big, large vendors are being gobbled up and such. But there’s a very specific reason to go to Chronosphere over other solutions. Maybe you can just double click a little bit down on that, because I think that really, the audience should know that.
Martin Mao: Yeah, 100%. For us, this acquisition, again, adds this concept of controlling your data and managing your costs through controlling that data. That for us is one of our major differentiators. We’ll talk about the other one in a second here, but that’s one of our major differentiators. Because the trend at which the observability data was growing, and hence directly correlated, the observability cost was growing, was an unsustainable trend. The cost of observability data and the volume of observability data increase over time is growing far faster than your overall cloud information footprint.
It was an unsustainable growth pattern. For us, solving that problem was key, in our mind, for the industry and that’s one of our major differentiators. Having Calyptia allowed us to do that for the log data type as well, and we’ve been doing it for metrics and for distributed traces this whole time, really does help us to continue to differentiate, at least on the cost side, for us there, but yeah.
Paul Nashawaty: That makes sense, Martin. I think that customer choice, that’s what I’ve heard. I heard you customers can get to where they want to go to, they can leverage the platform for as much or as little, even if their journey doesn’t mean that they’re fully on that right side of the observability spectrum, they could be on the left side and just getting started, and they can still know and figure out how to get there. It’s definitely you have that customer choice to get them in the door, and try it, crawl, walk, run approach. But, Martin, as we’re wrapping this up, this last section, what’s next for Chronosphere? What do you see as the next advancements in the observability and the security space?
Martin Mao: Yeah. On one hand for us, we’re going to continue down this cost control side of things for sure, and just really start to get more advanced there. But what’s more interesting is, and you mentioned this earlier, it’s all about actionable insights. I think the industry has been talking about a single pane of glass for a very long time. The problem with a single pane of glass is yes, you have all of your data in one place, but it’s all raw data. To what I said earlier about the volume increase in the amount of data there is, it’s almost too much for any developer to sift through.
Now when something goes wrong, there’s so much data for somebody to process and figure out what’s going on, it’s actually quite hard and quite a difficult job to do. For us, the other differentiator of Chronosphere is that we actually automatically, through this feature called Chronosphere Lens which is our unique user experience, we actually automatically analyze all that raw data for you, and only present you the actionable insights. The whole thing is about actionable insights there. That’s really where both our investment is going to be going more and more into as we move forward, but also I think where the industry’s going a well.
If you look at the trend of more complex environments, more data, more signals I would say, one, you have to go deal with the cost of that, and two, you have to get more value out of that at a quicker pace. Those are really the two problems that we’re trying to solve here, and I think those are the two problems that the industry is running into, and hence that’s where we want to make our investments.
Paul Nashawaty: Exciting. But for the audience here that’s watching this video right now, how would they get started with Chronosphere? Where do they go and what do they do? If they know nothing about this, how do they get going?
Martin Mao: Yeah. Probably the best place is to go to chronosphere.io. We do our website there. We do have a lot of blog content, we do have a lot of webinars and things like that, that talks about I would say the problems that people on this call may be running into, and perhaps some of the ways that they can use Chronosphere to go help solve those particular problems.
Paul Nashawaty: Very good, Martin. Martin, it’s always a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for your insights and your overview of Chronosphere, and this new acquisition as well as this partnership. It’s a very exciting time. I love the picture of Mount Rainier in the background, the Space Needle, it’s fantastic to see that. I also want to thank the audience for watching today. Subscribe to our channel so you never miss an episode and we’ll talk to you next time. Thank you very much and have a great day.
Other insights from The Futurum Group:
Application Development and Modernization
The Evolving Role of Developers in the AI Revolution
Docker Build Cloud Aims to Revolutionizing DevOps – The Futurum Group
Author Information
At The Futurum Group, Paul Nashawaty, Practice Leader and Lead Principal Analyst, specializes in application modernization across build, release and operations. With a wealth of expertise in digital transformation initiatives spanning front-end and back-end systems, he also possesses comprehensive knowledge of the underlying infrastructure ecosystem crucial for supporting modernization endeavors. 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.
