 From New York City, it's theCUBE covering New Relic Future Stack 2019. Brought to you by New Relic. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of New Relic's Future Stack 2019 here in New York City. Seventh year of the show, our first year here, about 600 or so in attendance and really excited because we've had some of the users here to help kick off our coverage and joining us, first time guest on the program, Josh Bigley, he's a senior engineer of enterprise modeling with Cartner Health, coming to us from a little bit further north and east than I do, Prince Edward Island. Thanks so much for coming here to New York City and joining me on the program. Yeah, thanks for having me, Stu. I'm excited to be here. I haven't been in New York. It's probably been more than two decades. So it's a nice to be back in a big city. I live in a very small place. Yeah, so if you go to Times Square, it's now Disneyland is what we call it. It's not the 42nd Street that it might have been a couple of decades ago. I grew up about 45 minutes from here, so it's gone through a lot. Love the city, especially gorgeous weather we're having here in the fall. I'm excited for it. All right, so Josh, Cartner Health, Health is in the name, so we think we understand a little bit about it, but tell us a little bit about the organization itself and how it's going through changes these days. Sure, so Cartner Health is a global healthcare solutions provider. We are essential to care, which means we deliver the products and solutions that your healthcare providers need to literally cure disease, keep people healthy. So we're in 85% of the hospitals in the United States, 26,000 pharmacies, about 3 million different home healthcare users receive products from us. Again, we're global, so we're based in Dublin, Ohio, just outside of Columbus, but obviously I live in Canada, so I work for the Cartner Health Canada Division. We've got acquisitions around the world, so yeah, it's an exciting company. We've recently gone through a transformation, not only as a company, but from a technology side, where we've shifted one of our data centers entirely into the cloud. All right, and Josh, your role inside the company tells us a little bit about kind of, you said it's global, what's under your purview? Yeah, so my team is responsible for enterprise monitoring, and that means that we develop, deploy, support, and integrate solutions for monitoring both infrastructure applications and digital experience for our customers. We have a number of tools, including New Relic that we use, but it's a broad scope for a small team. Okay, and you talked about that transformation, walk us through a little bit about that, what led to, as you said, some big moves into public cloud? Yeah, our team is part of an overall effort to allow Cartner Health to be more adaptive, to be more agile. The move to cloud allows teams that are developing applications and platforms to make a decision how to respond to the needs of their customers more rapidly. I mean, gone are the days of I need a new server, I need to predict six months from now that I'm going to need a new server, put the order in, get it delivered, get it rat, get it wired. We want to allow people to provision on demand. I mean, our Senior Vice President, or my Senior Vice President likes to say, I want you to fail fast, fail cheap. He does not say fail often, although sometimes I do that, but that's okay. As long as you recognize that you're failing and can roll that back, redeploy. It's been really transformative for my team in particular, who was very infrastructure focused when I started with the company five years ago. All right, and can you bring us inside from your application portfolio? Was it a set of applications? Was it an entire data center? What moved over? How long did it take? And can you share what cloud you're using? Sure, so it's been about a two-year journey. We're actually a multi-cloud company. We've got a small footprint in Azure, small footprint in AWS, but we're primarily in Google Cloud. We are shutting down one data center. We are minimizing another data center. And we've moved everything. We've moved everything from small bespoke applications that are targeted on a team to entire e-commerce platforms. And we've done everything from lift and shift, which I know you don't like to hear, but we've done lift and shift. We've done re-hosting. We've done refactoring. And we've re-architected entire platforms. Yeah, so if you could expand a little bit, when we say lift and shift, I'm fine with lift and shift as long as there's another word or plan after that, which I'm expecting you do have. Yeah, absolutely. So the lift and shift was, hey, let's move from our data centers into GCP. Let's give teams the visibility, the observability that they need so that they can make the decisions on what they need to do best. In a lot of cases, in fact, in 15% of the 6,500 servers that we touched, we actually full out decom the instance. Teams had them, they were running in our data centers, but they weren't actually providing any value to the company. So you said your team before was mostly concerned about infrastructure. And a lot of what you did is now on GCP. So you fired the entire team and you hired a bunch of PhDs to be able to manage Google environments? Absolutely not. The principles of enterprise monitoring as a practice still apply in the cloud. We are at heart data geeks and I would fair say that we're actually data storytellers. Our job is to give tools and methodologies to application teams who know what the data means in context, but we give the tools to provide that data to them. All right, I love that. I believe I've actually seen data geek shirts at the New Relic shows itself, but data storytellers, that was the kind of thing that you heard. I have a data scientist that's going to help us to do this. Is that data scientist in New York or are you actually enabling, who is able to tell those data stories today? So that is the unique part. Data storytelling is not a data science. I wish that I could be a data scientist. I like math, but I'm not nearly that good at it. A data storyteller takes data and the narrative of the business and weaves them together. I mean, when you tell someone here's some data, they will look at it and they will develop their own narrative around it. But as a storyteller, you help craft that narrative for them. They're going to look at that data and they're going to feel it. They're going to understand it and it's going to motivate them to act in a way that is aligned with what the business objectives are. So data storytellers come in all forms. They come as monitoring engineers, they are app engineers, but they're also people who are facing the customer. They're business leaders. They're people in our distribution centers who are trying to understand the impacts of orders in their order flow, in their personnel that they have. It is a discipline that anyone can engage in if we're willing to give them the right tools. All right, so Josh, you got rid of a data center. You're not using a data center. You're shifting to cloud. You're making a lot of changes and now being able to tell data stories. Can you tell us organizationally, everything goes smoothly? Are there any things that you learned along the way that maybe you could share with your peers to kind of help them along that journey and any kind of rough spots with hindsight being what it is that you might be able to learn from? Yeah, so hindsight, definitely 2020. The one thing that I would say to folks is get your data right. Metadata, trusting your data is key. It's absolutely vital. We talk a lot about automation and automation is one of those things that the cloud enables very nicely. If you automate on garbage data, you are going to automate garbage generation. That was one of our struggles and I think that every organization struggles with data fidelity, but teams need to spend more time in making sure that their data, specifically the metadata around, hey, is this prod, is it non-prod? You know, what stack is this running? Who built it? Those things definitely need to be sorted out. Okay, talk about kind of observability and the monitoring that you do. How long have you been using New Relic and what products and tell us a little bit about that journey? Sure, so we've been using New Relic for about two years. I mean, it was a bit of a slow run up to its adoption. We are a multi-tool company, so we have a number of tools. Some of them are focused primarily on our network infrastructure, our on-prem storage. Although Cardinal has moved predominantly to the cloud, we have distribution centers, nuclear pharmacies all around the world, and those facilities have not gone into the cloud. So you've got network connectivity. New Relic for us has filled our cloud niche and observability, as Lou announced, is going to give us context to things that we're after, right? You hear the term dark data. We call them ops logs. It's data that we want to have, we only need it for a very short period of time to help us do post-op or RCAs, as well as to look at overall in our organization the performance of the applications. For us, New Relic is going to give us an option to put data for observability. I mean, observability is really about high-fidelity data. In its world of cloud, everyone wants everything right now, and they also want it down to the millisecond. A platform that can pull that off, that's a remarkable thing. Yeah, Verucasalt had it right. I want it now. So are you using New Relic One yet? We have been using New Relic One for, I mean, at least a couple of months, going back into March this year. It's exciting. We're one of those companies that Lou talked about in his keynote. We have hundreds of sub-accounts, and we did so very intentfully, but it was a bit of a nightmare before we got to New Relic One. That ability to see, for a platform team, to see across multiple sub-accounts is really powerful. Okay, so you saw a lot of announcements this morning. Anything particular that jumped out you or you're excited because, Lou kept saying over and over, and if you're using New Relic One, this is free, this is free, this is free. That platform where it's all available for you now. I think the programmability is one of the things that really got me excited. I mean, one of the engineers on my team had a chance to go and sit with Lou and team two weeks ago, and was part of that initial hackathon, made some really interesting things. That's exciting, so shout out to Zach and the work that he did. Logging, for me, is something that is huge. I know we've got data that we should have in context, so that Lou announced five terabytes of ingestion for free. All I could do was clap my fingers together and think, oh, okay, you're asking for it, Lou, challenge accepted. That's exciting, right? So you feel that you're going to be building apps that sounds like already at the future hack that you're starting to move down that path. Definitely. I'm really excited, not to necessarily give it to my team. I mean, we build the patterns for teams that need patterns, but there are so many talented individuals at Cardinal Health who, if we give them the patterns to follow, they're just going to go execute. Open sourcing that is a brilliant idea. Really crowd sourcing development is the way to go. Yeah, I think you bring up a really interesting point. So even though your team might be the one that provides the platform, you're giving that programmability and sensibility to a broader audience inside the team and democratizing the data that you have in there. Yes, you keyed in on one of the things I love to talk about, which is that democratized access to data. Over and over again, you'll hear me preach that. I know what I know, but I also know what I don't know. And more particular, I don't know what I don't know. I need other people to help me recognize that. Well, and we've really talked about, that buzzword out there about digital transformation, when it is actually being happened, it goes from, oh, well, somebody had an opinion to, wait, I actually now can actually get to the data and show you the data and leverage the data to be able to take good actions on that. That's right, yeah, data-driven decision making is not just an idiom. It's not something that is a buzzword. It is a practice that we all need to follow. All right, so, Josh, you're speaking here at the show. Give our audience a quick taste, if you will, about what you're going to be sharing with your peers here at the show. I mean, we've actually talked about it a lot of already, so I hope that people are not going to watch this session before my session later, but it really is around the power of digital transformation, the power of observability, what happens when you do things right, and the way that cloud makes teams more nimble. I won't give you at all, because then, people won't watch my session on replay, but yeah, it'll be good. Yeah, well, definitely they should check that out. I'm hoping New Relic has that available on replay. Give you the final word here. What you're really hoping to kind of come out of this week sounds like your team's deeply engaged. You've done the hackathon. You're working with the executive team, so Future Stack 2019, what are you hoping to walk away with? For me, it's about developing patterns. My team, in addition to our enterprise architecture team, is responsible for mapping out what we're going to do and how we're going to do it. Teams want to go fast, and if we're not going to lay down the foundation for them to move quickly, especially in the realm of enterprise monitoring, they're going to try to do it themselves, which may or may not work. I mean, we don't want to turn teams away from using specific tools if it fits, but if there's a platform that will allow them to execute and to keep all that data centralized, I mean, that is really the key to observability. Having that high-fidelity data, but then being able to ask questions, not just of the data that you put in, but the data that was put in maybe by a platform team or by a team that supported Kubernetes or PCF. All right, well, Josh Bigley, thank you so much for sharing all that you've been going through in Cardinal Health transformations. It's great to talk to you. Thanks so much, Stu. All right, lots more here at New Relics Future Stack 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, as always. Thank you for watching theCUBE.