Elastic for Search & Analytics

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?