>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida,
it's theCUBE, covering .conf2018!
Brought to you by Splunk.
(techno music)
>> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody.
We're here with theCUBE covering Splunk.conf2018.
I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman.
Chris Crocco is here,
he's the Lead Solutions Engineer at ViaSat.
Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE.
>> Well, thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
>> You're very welcome.
Let's start with ViaSat.
Tell us what you guys do and what your role is all about.
>> So ViaSat is a global communications
and technology company
primarily focused on satellite-based technologies,
anything from government services
to commercial aviation and residential service.
>> And what does a Lead Solutions Engineer do?
>> My primary role is to help us kind of transition
from a traditional operations state
into more of a DevOps environment
including monitoring, alerting,
orchestration and remediation.
>> Oh, we love this conversation, don't we?
Okay.
The basic question is,
and I know it's hard, but it's subjective,
it's kind of if you think about the majority
of your organization in the context of DevOps,
on a scale of one to five, five being nirvana,
so let's assume you're not at five
'cause it never ends, right?
You're constantly evolving.
Where would you say you are?
Are you just getting started?
Are you more like a four, 4 1/2, what do you think?
>> That's a good question.
I would say we're probably three on our way to four.
We've had a lot of growing pains,
we've had a lot of learning opportunities.
The processes of DevOps are getting pretty well-entrenched
and right now, we're working on making sure
that the culture sticks with the DevOps.
>> That's critical, right?
>> I mean, that's really where the rubber meets the road
is that organizational and political.
Without getting into the dirt of it,
give us what it looked like before
and where you are today.
>> Sure.
Prior to our shift to DevOps,
which was mainly motivated
by our latest spacecraft, ViaSat-2,
we had a very traditional operational model
where we had everything funneled
through a Network Operations Center,
we had a Technical Operations Team,
and if they weren't able to triage and remediate issues,
they kicked it over the fence to engineers and developers
who would then throw something back.
There wasn't a lot of communication
between the two organizations,
so when we did find recurring problems,
recurring issues in our network and in our environment,
it took a long time to get those resolved
and we had to have a large volume of staff there
just to kind of put out the fires.
With the transition of DevOps,
one of the things that we've been focusing on
is making sure that our development teams,
our engineering teams understand the customer experience
and how it's impacted by what they do,
and de-centralizing that operation structure
so all of the triage work goes to the people
who actually work on those services.
So it's a pretty big paradigm shift
but it's also helping us solve customer problems faster
and get better education about
what the customer experience is
to the people who actually make it better.
>> And roughly, what was the timeframe that it took
to go from that really waterfall model
to the structure that you have today?
>> We've been going for about two
or three years now in this transition.
Like I said, the first year or so was kind of bumpy
and we've really kind of ramped up over the past year
in terms of the amount of teams that are practicing DevOps,
the amount of teams that are in an agile and scrum model.
So overall, two to three years to get to where we are today.
>> So the problem with the traditional model
is you have time to deployment is slower,
that means time, the value is slower, a lot of re-work.
Here, you take it. No, you take it.
Hey, it worked when I gave it to you,
a lot of back and forth,
and not a lot of communication creates frustration,
not a lot of collaboration and teamwork,
then you're working through that now.
How large is the team?
>> My team is five people.
We have 4,500 people roughly at ViaSat as a whole.
I believe roughly 2,000 of them
are in an engineering or technical role.
>> Okay, but in the previous model,
you had developers and you had operations folks,
is that right?
And your five are sort of split over those
or was it a much, much larger corpus of folks?
>> It was a very large distribution of people.
It was very engineering and developer-centric.
We still had a Core Operations Team
of 60 to 100 people based in our Denver office.
We're keeping our headcount relatively the same
with respect to our operations
and we're growing a lot in terms of those DevOps teams.
So as those teams continue to grow,
we're adding more operational resources to them
and kind of inserting a lot of that knowledge
into other parts of the organization.
>> You're doing a lot more with the same.
Are you coming from the ops side or the dev side?
>> I come from the ops side.
I actually started my career
with ViaSat in our knock in Denver.
From there, I transitioned into a ops analyst role
and then we created the Solutions Engineering Team
and I took the lead on that.
>> Chris, can you tell us how Splunk plays into your DevOps?
Did you start using it in the knock and kind of go from there?
>> We did, actually.
Splunk started out as just a tool for us
to see how many modems were offline in the knock.
It was up on the video wall and we would see spikes
and know that there was a problem.
And as we've made this transition at DevOps,
a lot of teams that were using other solutions,
other open-source and home-grown solutions
were kind of organically pivoting to Splunk
because it was a lot easier for them to use
for alerting dashboards, deep-data analysis,
a lot of the things they needed to do their job effectively.
So as we've grown as a company,
as we've grown in this organizational model,
Splunk has kind of grown along with that
in terms of use case.
>> That growth is predominately
in IT operations and security, correct?
>> Well, it's actually pretty interesting.
It's kind of all over the board in our organization.
It started in IT operations and security,
but we have people in our marketing department using it
to make sales and campaign decisions.
We have executive leadership looking at it
to see the performance of our spacecraft,
we have exploratory research being done with it
in terms of what's effective and what's not
for our new spacecraft that will be coming out,
the ViaSat-3 Constellation.
So it's really all over the board in our organization.
>> That's interesting, Stu,
you're not the first customer who's told us that no,
it's not just confined to IT,
it's actually seeping through the organization.
Despite the fact that we heard
a bunch of announcements today,
I don't know if you saw the keynotes,
making it simpler for lines of business folks
to actually utilize Splunk,
so given that a lot of your teams in the business
are actually using it already,
what do you think these announcements will do for them?
Maybe you haven't had time to evaluate it,
but essentially, it's making it easier for business people,
you know, simplifying it.
>> Yeah, you know, all of the announcements in the keynotes
over the past two days have been really, really exciting.
Everything that I was hoping for got checked off the list.
So I think one of the big things
that it's going to allow us to do
is get our customer-facing teams
and our customer care organizations
more involved with the tool.
And getting them the information that they need
to better serve customers that are calling in,
and potentially even prevent the situations
that customers have to call in for in the first place.
So giving them a lot of account information quickly,
giving them the ability to access information
that is PCI and PII-compliant
but still allowing them to get the data they need
to service an individual customer,
all of those things I think are really going to be impacted
by the announcements in this conf.
>> So you were the keynote yesterday.
>> Chris: I was!
>> Were you shaking the phone?
>> I was, yeah.
>> Dave: Which group were you, were you orange?
>> We were orange group, yeah.
>> We were orange, too!
But we were sitting in the media section
and all the media guys were sitting on their hands
but we had a lot of devs and ops guys shaking with us.
It's like when you do the wave at Fenway Park
when it gets behind home plate,
everybody just kind of sits down, but we were plugging hard.
Alright, Chris, what else has excited you about .conf2018?
School stuff that you've seen, some innovations,
things you've learned.
>> Well, I'm really excited about the app for infrastructure.
That's something that we've been trying to get for ITSI
for a long time now in terms of NED-level monitoring
and NED-level thresholding.
I think that's going to complement
our business really, really well.
The advancements that they're doing with the metrics store,
specifically with things like Syslog
are really, really exciting.
I think that that's going to allow us to accelerate our data
and make it more performant.
The S3 compliant storage is absolutely fantastic
and it comes in black now
and that's really, really fantastic.
>> Oh right!
The dark mode! >> Dark mode, yup.
>> You mentioned the ITSI.
Have you used the VictorOps pieces before
or is that something you're looking to do?
>> We haven't looked at VictorOps as of yet.
We're an xMatters customer right now
so we've been using their integration that they built out
and it's on Splunk base.
But VictorOps, it'll be interesting to see
how that organization changes
now that it's part of the Splunk.
>> So dark mode actually, it's one of those things
that it really got such a loud ovation.
It was funny, I was actually talking
to a couple Splunkers that are like,
"We want that dark mode t-shirt."
Which I think you have to be a user
and you need to sign up
for some research thing that they're doing,
and they're giving out the black shirt
that has like gray text on it.
>> Chris: Awesome!
>> Why does that resonate with you, the dark mode?
>> Well, it was actually
what they talked about in the keynote.
If you have it up on a video wall,
which we have in various parts of our company,
or if you're sitting in a dark office, something like that,
looking at a really white screen for a long period of time,
it's not easy on your eyes,
it's hard to look at for a long period of time.
And generally speaking, a lot of our presentation layers
go towards that visual format.
So I think this is going to allow us
to make it much more appealing to the people
who are putting this up on screens in front of people.
>> Your responsibility extends out into the field, I presume.
The data that's in the field,
is that true? >> It does.
>> Okay, so I'm interested in your reaction
to the industrial IoT announcements,
how you see or if you see
your organization taking advantage of that.
>> Well, we're a very vertically integrated company
so we actually manufacture a lot of the devices that we use
and that we provide to our customers.
I think a lot of our manufacturing capabilities
would really benefit from that.
Anything from building antennas for ground segment
that actually talked to the spacecraft.
It's the modems that we put in people's houses,
that entire fabrication process I think would benefit a lot.
I really loved the AR presentation that they did
where they were actually showing the overlay
of metrics on a manufacturing line.
I think that's something that would be fantastic for us,
particularly for sending somebody to an antenna
or a ground station to replace a piece of equipment.
We can overlay those metrics,
we can overlay all of that,
we can use the industrial analytics piece of that
to actually show which piece of hardware is most affected
and how best to replace that.
So a lot of opportunities there for our company.
>> So I wonder if you could help us understand
what's, from your perspective, on Splunk's to-do list.
We're going to have Doug Merritt on a little later.
If you had Doug right here and he said, Chris,
what can we do to make your life better?
What would you tell him?
>> You know, I think a couple of the things
that would make it better,
and it looks like they're heading this direction,
is streaming in and streaming out.
You know, streaming in is of course important,
that's where a lot of your data lives,
but you also have to be able to send that out
to Kafka, to Kinesis, to other places,
so other people can consume the output
of what Splunk is doing.
So I think that would be a really, really important thing
for us to socialize the benefit of Splunk.
And then vertically integrating
the incident management chain,
it looks like something that's on their roadmap
and I'd be interested to see what their roadmap looks like
in terms of pulling in Phantom, pulling in VictorOps,
pulling in some of these other technologies
that are now in the Splunk umbrella
to really make that end-to-end process
of detecting, directing and remediating issues
a lot more efficient.
>> Okay, and do you see at some point
that the machine will actually do,
the machine intelligence will do a lot of that remediation?
>> I think so. >> Do you see the human
still heavily involved?
>> Well, I think one of the important things is
for a lot of these remediation things,
we shouldn't have a human involved, right?
Particularly things that are well-known issues.
Human beings are expensive and human beings are important,
and there are a lot more important things
that they can be doing with their time
than putting out fires.
So if we can have machines doing that for them,
it frees them up to do a lot more cool stuff.
>> You're right.
Alright, Chris, well listen, thanks very much
for coming on theCUBE.
It was great to have you. >> Yeah!
Appreciate it very much. >> Thanks for your insights.
Alright, keep it right there, everybody.
Stu and I will be back with our next guest.
You're watching theCUBE from Orlando Splunk.conf2018.
Be right back.
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