About the Guest

Cory G Watson is a Technical Director at SignalFx with 20 years of SWE, SRE and leadership experience at the likes of Twitter and Stripe. He's an observability wonk, optimist, and lover of sneakers. He hopes you're having a great day!

Links

• Twitter: @gphat
• Website: onemogin.com

Links Referenced

• Patrick McKenzie’s blog post, “I’m Joining Stripe to Work on Atlas”
• Book recommendation: Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few

Transcript

Mike Julian: This is the Real World DevOps podcast. I'm your host, Mike Julian. I'm setting out to meet the most interesting people doing awesome work in the world of DevOps. From the creators of your favorite tools, to the organizers of amazing conferences, from the authors of great books to fantastic public speakers, I want to introduce you to the most interesting people I can find.

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Mike Julian: Hi folks. I'm Mike Julian, your host for the Real World DevOps podcast. My guest this week is Cory Watson, Technical Director for the Office of the CTO at SignalFX. He's previously run observability at Stripe and Twitter. Cory, welcome to the show.

Cory Watson: Thanks for having me.

Mike Julian: I think it's interesting that you have gone from running observability teams at pretty interesting places like Stripe and Twitter.

Cory Watson: Thank you, thank you.

Mike Julian: To now, you're working for the enemy.

Cory Watson: That's a good way to put it.

Mike Julian: Yeah, you have suddenly gone to the vendor side.

Cory Watson: Yeah, the nicer way that I put it, is I say I switched sides of the table.

Mike Julian: Ah, yes. That is a much better way to put it. Apologies to my sponsors for insinuating that they're the enemy. You're completely right, it really is just the other side of the table.

Cory Watson: That implies that it's just a simple change in aspect, though. It's really not. It's actually a pretty fascinating difference, I think.

Mike Julian: Well, why don't you tell us more about that? What is that difference? What is it all about?

Cory Watson: I think, in the past, when you work at a place that uses these vendors, you're often trying to make sure you maintain, or at least it's always been my goal to maintain, a sort of neutrality or maybe not a shim layer is the right way to put it. But how do we retain our independence and make sure that we could switch, if necessary, and all these other things? It's both good, usually from a technical perspective, but also from a leverage perspective, right? Because you wanna be able to switch if you need to or go to the new, cool thing that might come out. Not that we jump and switch that frequently, but you wanna be able to retain that independence. Now, suddenly, I'm on the opposite side. I think there's two interesting bits about it. One is the change in perception or the change in the approach. The second is just the learning experience that I have from watching business being conducted from this side of the table. I guess we can start on the difference in perspective. To your earlier question, it's like, alright. Here I am previously sitting over here, going like, "Okay, don't tell them anything and pretend like you hate everything that they show you, and never show your true colors."

Mike Julian: Fantastic negotiating tactics.

Cory Watson: For lack of any better training, I think that it's the place that you try to go. But at the same time, it's actually somewhat different than I imagined, because I'm happy to work for a company that largely isn't trying to sell you something for the sake of selling it to you. I think this is true of pretty much all vendors, we only want you, as a customer, if you're ultimately going to be happy. Especially for the duration that many of these engagements, contracts, or purchase periods, or whatever last, you don't just want to ease in, make a buck, and then ease back out again. You've got to stay with it.

Cory Watson: In many ways, I think that my past experience of wanting to hold everything close to the vest, to use that idiom, don't really work that well because you need to give as much information as you can to the vendor so that the vendor can, hopefully, tailor the solution as well as possible, right? At the same time, I think it all comes down to price, though, at the end of the day. I think in that, luckily I don't have to have that conversation. I am only here to talk about the pros and cons and the approaches of how to do observability and how SignalFX can be helpful for you. I actually think that in switching sides, I've actually seen how it can actually hinder the process of adoption and understanding. Because, if you're like, "Well, we're not gonna tell you how many things we're monitoring, or how many metrics there are, or what our challenges are." It makes it extremely difficult to articulate a value proposition to the other people because suddenly I'm like, "If I can't help you size this, I don't know how to have the conversation." It's interesting to be on the side where you suddenly lack so much information because-

Mike Julian: I've run into that in the Amazon world, where people will say, "Oh, we're spending a ton of money with Amazon, but we don't want to tell them what our future plans are. We don't wanna tell them about our product roadmap because security reasons. What if they leak it, what if they try to do it themselves?" On some level, like it's AWS so maybe it will actually happen.

Cory Watson: Yeah, as we saw last week.

Mike Julian: Right. When you're spending that much money with a company, when a company is such a core aspect of how you do business, for example on monitoring product, it's no longer a vendor. They're a partner.

Cory Watson: Yeah, that's an excellent way to put it. I love that phrasing because I felt that way even as a customer. I've been a customer of many companies in this context, in the monitoring, observability, whatever context system stuff, and it's true. Once that spin gets to a certain amount or when it's such a critical part of your infrastructure, these systems...