>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube
covering AWS re:Invent 2017.
Presented by AWS, Intel,
and our ecosystem of partners.
>> Hey, welcome back to The Cube.
Continuing live coverage on day three of AWS re:Invent 2017.
We have had three days of great coverage,
44,000 or plus people at this event,
lots of great announcements from AWS, from their partners,
and we're very excited to be joined by our next guest,
Christoph Pfister, the Executive Vice President of
products from SolarWinds.
Thanks for stopping by and chatting
with Justin and me today.
>> Thank you for having me.
>> So tell us, what's going on at SolarWinds?
What are some of the cool things
that you're here to announce?
>> Right, so first of all, great show, isn't it?
>> Justin: Amazing.
>> Lisa: Very (mumbles). Yes.
(Christoph laughs) >> And it's a great show for us
because we've announced a few new products and initiatives,
and amongst them, the first product
that provides both powerful and affordable
full-stack monitoring for DevOps people.
And so we'll talk hopefully a little bit more
about that in a few minutes,
but that's really the heritage of SolarWinds.
We provide software that's simple,
yet powerful and affordable,
and we've been doing that since about 1999,
when the company was founded in Austin, Texas.
And the big thing about this is that
we build software that IT professionals love,
and they love it because it's simple,
approachable, affordable, yet powerful,
and that has propelled us to a leadership position
in Network Management, Network Monitoring.
So, SolarWinds is the number one by
market share in that space,
and we're now aiming to bring that to the...
That simplicity, that power to cloud monitoring as well.
>> So, you have a great community of people--
>> Yes, huge community. >> Who love SolarWinds.
Massive community, the ThWACK community,
and everything that people talk about online--
>> You know the company well. That's good.
>> I know the company well.
I've been to Austin many times, I've been to the campus.
It's a great company.
So, people know those tools really well.
As you say, you're very, very strong in network monitoring,
so tell us a bit more about this
full-stack monitoring that you're doing.
What do you mean by "full-stack"?
>> Yes, so if you think about some of
the key trends we see in the market...
Let's go top to bottom.
AWS announcing all these services here at the event,
machine learning services, (mumbles) services,
new database stuff...
Amazing.
And so, all of these services
gonna to make their way, eventually,
into applications, into apps, right?
So, there's going to be more and more apps,
and these apps gonna deliver value
to business, to consumers,
and therefore need to run pretty much flawlessly, right?
Yet, behind this usually simple
user experience of these apps,
these apps have become massively complex, right?
So, back in the day, and I'm going to
date myself a little bit now,
when I started in monitoring, it was pretty simple.
There was a (mumbles) server, three tiers,
and the app was pretty static, right?
So nowadays, it's all about microservices--
>> All those microservices.
>> All these dependencies that exist,
which means that if there's a failure,
it may be cascading failure,
and so it's much, much more difficult to
figure out if your app is doing well or not.
And so, monitoring becomes so
much more important in that context.
And by the way, here at the show,
people talk about monitoring a lot,
and maybe (mumbles) that I would have
is that in the marketplace,
one of the top eight categories that
Dave (mumbles) mentioned on stage at the
(mumbles) event was monitoring is
the one thing in the marketplace
that people just need and want,
so monitoring is important,
and so what we're announcing here at...
What we've announced here at the show is
a brand new product called AppOptics,
and AppOptics converges traditional infrastructure
and application performance management,
and provides coverage for what we call
"The Three Layers of Observability,"
which are metrics, logs, and transaction traces,
because we think that without transaction traces
in these microservices-type architectures,
very, very difficult to get to the root cause of issues,
and so, we aim to cover the three layers of,
or the three pillars, of observability:
metrics, logs and traces, with AppOptics,
and do it in a way that is simple and approachable.
>> What do you mean by...
I think it was a press article
that you were quoted in about "democratizing monitoring."
What do you mean by-- >> Do you like that term?
>> It's very cool. (Christoph laughs)
But what does it mean?
>> What does it mean?
Alright, so if you think about companies with
application portfolios, right,
so large companies may have between 500 and 800 apps,
but there's studies out there that say
only about 10% to 15% are being monitored.
And so, why is that?
It's for two reasons in our view.
One is that application performance monitoring
has been very affordable,
so it's a question of "If I need to buy...
If you need to pay $100 a host to
get application performance monitoring,
then many companies are not going to do it.
And second reason is approachability and simplicity,
meaning if you have to instrument you app manually...
And I know you guys had a guest the other day,
who talked about the importance of instrumenting apps.
That's totally true, but you have to make it approachable,
meaning the instrumentation has to be automatic.
And that's exactly what we provide.
We provide automatic, one single line instrumentation for
all these microservices' languages.
So, we cover seven languages, we cover PHP, Python,
Java, the .Net...
And I'm forgetting a few, of course,
and so making your application performance
and infrastructure monitoring
number one, cheaper...
So, we start with AppOptics at $7.50 a host a month.
If you compare that to the hundreds of bucks a host a month
that are kind of common game in the industry right now,
that's pretty disruptive.
And we make it much, much quicker to instrument these apps.
So, that's what we mean by democratizing
application performanceand infrastructure management
because we think many more companies
will be able to afford it,
and many more companies will be able to
actually deploy this stuff in a timely manner.
>> So once you've instrumented it, who's it targeted for?
Because, developers love to live in code land
and do everything through APIs,
but operators do actually like to
be able to see things in charts,
and for me, I like living on the command line absolutely,
but I enjoy a good picture as well,
and sometimes it's much, much easier to
see what's happening if I just draw a graph,
rather than sitting there looking at
streams of code flying by.
>> Christopher: Absolutely.
>> So, do you have both of those
options available in a DevOps model or...
>> Christoph: We totally (mumbles).
Who are the people you target for?
So, we target the DevOps engineers,
sometimes called System Reliability Engineer,
and so, we provide dashboards,
like the metrics, of course, that you would traditionally
want to see and see how things are going over time.
We provide the traces, and also, that's very graphical,
so you see how much time a transaction spends
in each of the layers of the app
in each of the microservices.
>> Justin: Okay.
>> And that's very visual as well.
And then, of course, we provide RESTful APIs as well to
a lot of developers to do stuff with it.
>> Yeah.
>> So, couple things that I heard you say
in terms of the value preposition SolarWinds brings is
being able to facilitate from 15% to hopefully 100%
of applications being monitored.
That price has really been--
>> 80% would be great.
>> If we get to 80%, we'll be great.
(Lisa laughs)
>> Well, you said that price has been a really big inhibitor,
so you guys do it for a lot less and faster.
Can you give an example of a customer
that you've really helped transform,
so that they get much more visibility into
upwards of 80% of their applications?
>> Yeah, so I mean, AppOptics is just coming out,
so we've announced it; it's a new product.
And so, we've had tons (mumbles) in beta.
The first thing that I would say is that
all of them were up and running,
and actually getting metrics into the dashboard
in between three and five minutes, so very, very fast.
(Mumbles) this one line...
Auto-instrumentation really clicks.
And so there's universities, there is smaller IT shops,
there's big companies who are interested
in that kind of stuff.
In general, one of the things that
people don't necessarily know about SolarWind's portfolio
is we've started to invest in Cloud, in roughly 2014.
We've acquired some premiere product and franchises,
one of them being Pingdom,
for digital experience monitoring.
Another one being Papertrail,
which is an amazing hosted log-management solution.
And between these solutions, we have about...
Slightly short of a million users already.
>> Lisa: Wow.
>> So, significant, significant footprint in the marketplace,
and so, customers that are "cloud native,"
born in the cloud companies like
GitHub, Spotify, AirBnb, and so...
Uber, as an example...
And you have the traditional companies:
New York Times, BBC, packaging companies, smaller compa--
I mean, it really running the gammit of the space out there.
>> What is digital experience monitoring,
and how are you doing that?
>> That's a great question.
(Lisa laughs)
>> So, we look at digital experience
monitoring from two facets, really.
The first facet is...
So, I talked a lot about observability
and sort of the white-box monitoring,
where you gotta drill down into the code
and the transaction, and so on,
but typically one goal of monitoring is to
be ahead of your consumers in terms of noticing problems.
And so for that, the best way, is really,
is to have synthetic transactions
that simulate user behavior hitting your app.
And so, that's one...
Synthetic monitoring's one dimension of digital experience.
But beyond that, and that's where we're investing
very heavily with Pingdom is this notion of...
Yeah, we talk a lot about apps,
but there's lots of companies out there
that are putting their stuff out on websites, right?
So nowadays, if I go to the doctor and later on,
I want to see my test results, it's on a website.
If I go to take my car to the garage,
they make appointments on a website.
And many times, these people have no idea
how their site is doing, what the response time is,
all that kind of stuff.
And that's what Pingdom provides,
but what we're doing, taking it beyond
the simple (mumbles) time and performance is
we're marrying business metrics, like bounce rates...
What's a bounce rate of the site?
What's the revenue that's the site driving right now
if it's a revenue-generating site, and correlating that
with the performance aspects of the site.
How are the transactions doing?
How long does it take from the first click
to the shopping cart?
And so, that's what we think of as digital experience,
and there's much, much more to do
because, really, what you want to do at the end
is to see how users flow through your webpage,
and where they probably disengage,
where they move somewhere else.
You want to detect these spots
and see if it has to do anything with the performance
or the way you laid out the site.
And so, digital experience monitoring,
we think, is going to be huge.
>> Lisa: Absolutely.
Well, thank you so much for stopping by,
Christoph, and speaking with Justin and me.
We could keep going, but unfortunately--
>> Christoph: Yeah!
>> We are out of time. >> It's so short.
>> Exactly, but we look forward to
having you back on the show next time.
>> I'd be delighted.
>> And we want to thank you for watching.
I'm Lisa Martin for my co-host, Justin Warren.
You're watching The Cube live from
day three at AWS re:Invent 2017.
Stick around, we'll be right back.