 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering PagerDuty Summit 2019. Brought to you by PagerDuty. Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at PagerDuty Summit. It's the fourth year of the show. Cube's been here for three years. It's amazing to watch it grow. I think it's finally outgrown the West and St. Francis here in lovely downtown San Francisco. And we're really excited to be joined by our next guest. He's Alex Solomon, the co-founder. Co-founder and CTO of PagerDuty. Been at this over 10 years. Alex, first off, congratulations. And what a fantastic event. Yeah, thank you very much. And thank you for having me on this show. So things have changed a lot since we had you on a year ago. This little thing called an IPO. So I'm just curious, you know, we have a lot of entrepreneurs that watch the show as a founder and kind of go through this whole journey. What was that like? What are some of the things you'd like to share from that whole experience? Yeah, it was incredible. The word I like to use is surreal. Like just kind of going through it, not believing that it's real in a way and joining by my lovely wife who came along for this festivities and just being able to celebrate that moment. I know it is just a moment in time and it's not the end of the journey. Right, right. Certainly, but it is a big milestone for us and being able to celebrate, we invited a lot of our customers, our early customers who have been with us for years to join us in that celebration. Our investors who have believed in us from back in, you know, 2010. Right, right. When we were just getting going and we just had a great time. I love it, I love it. Overnight success, 10 years in the making. One of my favorite expressions. And it was actually interesting when Jen pulled up some of the statistics around kind of what the internet was, what the volume of traffic was, what the complexity and the systems are. And it's really changed a lot since you guys began this journey 10 years ago. Yeah, it has. I mean back then, the most popular monitoring tool was Nagios and New Relica was around but just barely. And now it's like Datadog has kind of taken over the world and the world has changed. We're talking about not just microservices but containers and serverless and the cloud basically. Right, right. That's the kind of recurring theme that's changed over the last 10 years. But you guys made some early bets. You made bets on cloud, you made bets on DevOps, you made bets on automation. Those were pretty good, those turned out to be pretty good places to put your chips. Oh yeah. Right place, right time. And you know, some experiential stuff and just some raw luck. Right, all right, well let's get into it on some of the product announcements that are happening today. What are some of the things you're excited to finally get to showcase to the world? Yeah, so one of the big ones is related to our event intelligence release. We launched the product last year, a few months before Summit and this year we're making a big upgrade and we're announcing a big upgrade to the product where we have related incidents. So if you're debugging a problem and you have an incident that you're looking at, the question you're going to ask is, is it just my service or is there a bigger widespread problem happening at the same time? So we'll show you that very quickly. We'll show you are there other teams impacted by the same issue and we actually leverage machine learning to draw those relationships between ongoing incidents. Right. I want to unpack a little bit kind of how you play with all these other tools. You know, we were just at Sumo Logic a week or so ago, they're going to be on later, and people, I think it's confusing. There's like all these different types of tools and you guys partner with them all. I mean, the integration list that you guys have built, I wrote it down, it's service now, it's Splunk, it goes Zendesk, it goes on and on and on. So explain to folks, how does the PagerDuty piece work within all these other systems? Sure, so I would say we're really strong in terms of integrating with monitoring tools. So any sort of tool that's monitoring something and will emit an alert when something goes down or an event when something's changed, we integrate and we have a very wide set of coverage with all of those tools. Think you're like Datadog, AppDynamics, Neuralic, even old school Nagios of course. Right, right. And then we've also built a suite of integrations around all the ticketing systems out there. So service now, Gira, Gira service desk, Remedy as well. We also now built a suite of integrations around the customer support side of things. So that'll be Zendesk and Salesforce. That's interesting. Jen had a good example in the keynote and kind of in this multi-system world, where is the system of record? Because it used to be, everybody wanted to be the system of record, they wanted to be the single-planed glass. But it turns out that's not really the answer. There's different places for different solutions to add value within the journey within those other applications. Yeah, absolutely. I think the single-planed glass vision is something that a lot of companies have been chasing. But it's really hard to do because, like for example, Neuralic, they started in APM and they got really good at that. And that's kind of their specialty. Datadog's really good at metrics and they're all trying to converge and do everything and become the one monitoring solution to rule them all. But they're still the strongest in one area. Like Splunk for logs, Neuralic and AppDynamics for APM and Datadog for metrics. And I don't know where the world's going to take us. Like is there going to be one single monitoring tool or are you going to use four or five different tools? My best guess is we're going to live in a world where you're still going to use multiple tools. They're just going to do something really well but it's about the integration. It's about bringing all that data together. That's, from early days we've called Page of Duty the Switzerland of monitoring because we're friends with everyone, we're partners with everyone and we sit on top, work with all of these different tools. I thought our example she gave in the keynote is kind of illustrative to me. She was talking about, say your cable's down and you call Comcast and it's a Zendesk ticket but then that integrates potentially with the Page of Duty piece that says, hey, we're working a problem, a backhoe, clip the cable down your street and so to take kind of that triage and fix information and still pump that through to the Zendesk person who's engaging with the customer to actually give them a lot more information. So the two are different tracks but they're really complementary. Absolutely and that's part of the incident lifecycle is letting your customers know and helping them through customer support so that the support reps understand what's going on with the systems and can have an intelligent conversation with the customer so that they're not surprised. Like a customer calls and says you're down. Oh, good to know. No, you want to know about that earlier. Which I think Jen also said that's how most people find out, unfortunately. Another thing that struck me was this study that you guys have put together about unplanned work, the human impact of always on world. You know, we talk a lot in tech about unplanned maintenance and unplanned downtime of machines, whether it's a computer or a military jet, unplanned maintenance is a really destructive thing. I don't think I've ever heard anyone frame it for people and really to think about kind of the unplanned work that gets caused by an alert, a notification that is so disruptive and I thought that was a really interesting way to frame the problem and think of it from an employee-centric point of view to reduce the nastiness of unplanned work. Absolutely, and that is very related to that journey of going from being reactive and just reacting to these situations, to becoming proactive and being able to predict and address things before they impact the customer. I would say it's anywhere between 20 to 40 or even higher percent of your time, maybe looking at software engineers, is spent on the unplanned work. So what you want to do is you want to minimize that. You want to make sure that there's a lot of automation in the process, that you know what's going on, that you have visibility, and that the easy things, the repetitive things are easy to automate and the system could just do it for you so that you focus on innovating and not on fixing fires, left and right. Right, right. Or if you don't have to fix a fire, you at least get the fire to the right person who's got the right tool to fix a time. Absolutely. I would just, you know, we see that all the time in incidents, especially in early days, of a triage, like, you know, what's happening, who did it, you know, who's the right people to work on this problem? And you guys are putting a lot of the effort into AI and modeling and your 10 years of data history to get ahead of the curve and assigning that alert of that triage when it comes across the transom. Yeah, absolutely. And that's another issue. Not having the right ownership, getting people notified when they don't own it and there's nothing they can do about it. Like the old ways of sending the alert to everyone and having 100 people on a call bridge, that just doesn't work anymore because they're just sitting there and they're not gonna be productive the next day at work because they're sitting there all night, just kind of waiting for something to happen. And that's kind of the old way of lack of ownership, just blast it out to everyone. And we have to be a lot more targeted and understand who owns what and which systems are being impacted and they're only getting the right people on the call as quickly as possible. The other thing that came up which I thought probably a lot of people aren't thinking of, the only thing of the fixer guy that has to wear the pager. But there's a whole lot of other people that might need to be informed. We talked about the Comcast example, the people interacting with a customer. Maybe senior executives need to be informed, maybe people that are on the hook for the SLA on some of the software things. So the assembly of that team goes, who needs to know what goes well beyond just the two or three people that are the fixer people. Right. And that's actually tied to one of our announcements at Summit, our business response product. So it's all about, yes, we notify the people who are on call and are responsible for fixing the problem. The hands-on keyboard folks, the technical folks. But we've expanded our workflow solution to also loop in stakeholders. So think like executives, business owners, people who maybe they run a division but they're not going to go on call to fix the problem themselves. But they need to know what's going on. They need to know what the impact is. They need to know, is there a revenue impact? Is there a customer impact? Is there a reputational brand impact to the business they're running? Yeah. Which is another thing you guys have brought up, which is so important. It's not just about fixing the stuck server. It is, what is the brand impact? What is the business impact? It's a much broader conversation which is interesting to pull it out of just the poor guy in the pager, waiting for it to buzz versus now the whole company really being engaged to what's going on. Absolutely. Like connecting the technical, what's happening with the technical services and infrastructure to what is the impact on the business if something goes wrong. And how much, like, are you actually losing revenue? There's certain businesses like e-commerce when you can actually measure your revenue loss on a per minute or per five minute basis. Right, pretty important. Yeah. So you talked about the IPO as a milestone. It's fading in the rearview mirror. Now you're on the 90 day shot clock so you got to keep moving forward. So as you look forward now from your CTO role, what are some of your priorities over the next year so that you kind of want to drive this shit? Absolutely. So I think just focusing on making the system smarter and making it so that you can get to that predictive holy grail. Where we can know that you're going to have a big incident before it impacts our customers so you can actually prevent it and get ahead of it based on the leading indicators. So if we've seen this pattern before and last time it caused like an hour of downtime, let's try to catch it early this time so that you can address it before it impacts the customer. So that's one big area of investment for us. And the other one I would say is more on the real time work outside of managing software systems. So security, customer support, there's all of these other use cases where people need to know, like signals are being generated by machines. People need to know what's going on with those signals and you want to be proactive and preventative around it. Like think a factory with lots and lots of sensors. You don't want to be surprised by something breaking. You want to like get proactive about the maintenance of those systems so you don't have that, like say a multi-day outage in a factory will cost maybe millions of dollars. All right, well, Alex, thanks a lot. Again, congratulations on the journey. We enjoyed watching it and we'll continue to watch it evolve. So thanks for coming on. All right, he's Alex, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at Page of Duty Summit 2019 in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.