The Cloudcast #187 - API Performance Monitoring

Topic 1 - Briefly about your background on the company and team (John was at Twillio and IFTTT).

Topic 2 - How is API testing different than application testing? How is API Monitoring different from simple uptime monitoring? Who is a typical customer of Runscope, what types of challenges and tests are they solving for?

Topic 3 - Walk us thru how the testing works (you mention "no code needed") through the lifecycle of an application. What are some common problems across different platforms (browsers, OS) or different regions of the world?

Topic 4 - API versioning is a major headache. Anything you do to help simplify or manage that for customers? Don’t you still code as a CEO? Do you feel this pain?

Topic 5 - Runscope has a lot of community based projects (link in show notes). How did this come about and what advantages have you seen through the development of an API community?

Topic 6 - With so many APIs these days what's the best way to get started with API testing?

The Cloudcast #184 - Streaming Analytics for Distributed Applications

Projects of the Week - None this week

• SignalFx Website - https://signalfx.com/
• SignalFx REST API - https://support.signalfx.com/hc/en-us/articles/201270489
• TheNewStack covers SignalFx launch - http://thenewstack.io/signalfx-a-saas-to-monitor-apps-at-any-scale/
• Ben’s Blog - http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_past_and_future_of_systems_management

Topic 1 - Came out of Stealth recently (3/12), Give a quick overview of the company and the problem you are trying to solve… Given what SignalFx offers, it’s important to understand the people behind it. Let’s start with the background of the team - lots of large, webscale, distributed system background. [how much is “productizing lessons learned”?; how much is “the will be different in 5yrs”?]

Topic 2 - What does streaming analytics mean? Why do companies care about getting analytics faster? Why build an analytics engine to solve a monitoring problem?

Topic 3 - You mention (intro video) that you’re a company that builds services for distributed systems, which are run by product teams, not IT. You were previously at VMware. Can you talk about the different mindset those product teams have vs. IT teams, especially how SignalFx takes their ideas and feedback?

Topic 4 - Walk us through how your customers interact with your service? Where do metrics come from (app, message queue, etc)? How do you secure that API interaction? How are metrics different from logs or events?

Topic 5 - In the same vein as the shift from IT to the Product Groups, your co-founder mentions that Developers are closer to production than ever. What does that mean to the evolution of tools and overall psyche of application developers?

Topic 6 - You mention that SignalFx “double purposes as a Application Intelligence solution”. We’ve been watching lots of interesting SaaS applications  emerge that tend to have a more singular purpose (Logging, PerfMon, AppIntelligence, etc.). Are you hearing from customers that some consolidation of functions is needed?