IT Ops Query

Mark Tomlinson is senior director of performance and observability for digital payments provider FreedomPay. He previously worked for PayPal and also served as Chief Performacologist, founder and host of the PerfBytes podcast from 2012 to 2023. He talks about how his company uses generative AI tools in its observability practices, imagines the future possibilities for agentic AI ... and just as im...

Alois Reitbauer is chief technology strategist, head of open source and the leader of research at observability vendor Dynatrace. He is a contributor to CNCF open source standards such as the Keptn event-driven orchestration project and OpenFeature for feature flag management. His Dynatrace bio also describes him as "a regular conference speaker, blogger, book author and sushi maniac." He reflects...

The rise of generative and agentic AI is also OpenTelemetry's moment to shine – in an increasingly non-deterministic world, there's a lot to be said for a standard means of collecting telemetry data about system behavior. However, it can be difficult to get a consensus on everything, especially developers' preferences about instrumenting code. This week's guest, Austin Parker, was among the origin...

What if you could see your application and infrastructure represented spatially instead of two-dimensional dashboard tabs, similar to atoms in a molecule or stars in the sky? According to Matt Young, founder and co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technical advisory group (TAG) on observability, this will soon be a reality thanks to advanced AI models, knowledge graphs, and em...

Charity Majors pioneered the term 'observability' as co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, based on her experience building and managing distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of the O'Reilly books Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. Her Honeycomb bio adds that she "loves free speech, free software and single malt...

Multifaceted connection points are emerging between observability and AI, from monitoring and improving AI models themselves to observing the ways the behavior of AI agents differs from traditional web apps. In short, AI-driven automation makes new kinds of observability workflows both necessary and possible. This season of IT Ops Query will feature interviews with a variety of industry expert gue...

Sigstore creator, Chainguard CEO, OpenSSF TAC member and Season 1 guest Dan Lorenc returns to discuss the year in open source and security. Topics range from software supply chain management, hardening container images and SBOMs in limbo to open product companies and business models, including his own company's shift in focus this year. Plus: a look ahead to SecOps and AI in 2025. 

S&P Global Market Intelligence principal research analyst Daniel Kennedy discusses what the results of his Voice of the Enterprise research project dating back to 2015 reveal about the notion of a cybersecurity skills shortage; the effects of the Crowdstrike outage on a long-running debate about unified cybersecurity platforms vs best-of-breed vendors; and hopeful signs heading in to the next...

SecOps, developers and infrastructure ops teams are often encouraged to work more closely together within IT, but for one industry analyst, the CrowdStrike outage exposed an even more significant gap between IT and businesses.  Charles Betz is vice president and principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research. He has also worked as an adjunct professor at the University of St....

In October, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a report that's still generating buzz in the security world – it questioned the data sources in often-cited reports about the value of "shifting left". Another section of the CISA report called into question the idea that security flaws cause people to stop using products and concluded that "In general, it seems that qu...

Doug Merritt was CEO of Splunk from 2015 to 2021 and led the company's transition from an on-premises software company to a cloud-based service provider. After two years in the venture capital and board advisory space, Merritt joined multi-cloud networking company Aviatrix as CEO in 2023. That company introduced its first security product, a distributed firewall for Kubernetes, in May, and rolled...

Robert Slaughter is CEO of Defense Unicorns, a defense tech startup specializing in Airgap software delivery in highly secure and sensitive environments in the military and federal government. Previously, he was director of the U.S. Department of Defense's Platform One DevSecOps project and co-founder at Space CAMP, a predecessor of Platform One for the US Space Force. Prior to starting Defense Un...

Joshua Corman is executive in residence for public safety & resilience at The Institute for Security and Technology (IST), a non-profit think tank based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also co-leader of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) community working group for SBOM on-ramps & adoption. Previously, he was vice president of cybersecurity strategy for Claroty,...

Chris Steffen is vice president of research for information security at analyst firm Enterprise Management Associates. He previously held a variety of IT leadership roles at companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and DXC Technology. He is a regular speaker at industry conferences, the host of the Cybersecurity Awesomeness podcast and a frequent guest on other IT security podcasts. The day...

Esteban Gutierrez is chief information security officer and vice president of information security at observability vendor New Relic. Previously, he was an enterprise information security strategist at Intel, and he managed the network operations and security center for the US Army Corps of Engineers. He shares takeaways from New Relic's recent State of Observability survey, lessons learned from h...

Rich Lane is currently IT director at the City of Medford, Massachusetts, and has had a varied career in IT infrastructure and operations. He served as VP of digital operations strategy for data security software vendor Netenrich from 2021 to 2022, and as a Forrester Research analyst from 2018 to 2021. Before that, Lane worked as a professional services consultant for observability vendor Splunk,...

Melinda Marks is cybersecurity practice director for TechTarget's Enterprise Strategy Group analyst firm. Previously, she held a variety of roles in the IT and cybersecurity industry, including marketing and PR leadership positions at vendors such as VMware, Qualys, Tenable Network Security. Just before joining ESG in 2021, she was chief strategy officer and CMO at Soluble, makers of a CI/CD secur...

Kyler Middleton is senior principal software engineer at healthcare tech company Veradigm. She is also founder, owner, and CEO at 14ers Consulting, an IT services and engineering firm, as well as the co-host of her own podcast, Day Two DevOps and the founder of an IT training website, LetsDoDevOps.com. Her LinkedIn profile says, "I will teach you. It's unavoidable." In this episode, Middleton and...

Brian Jack is chief information security officer and data protection officer at KnowBe4, a security awareness training software vendor based in Clearwater, Florida. The company made headlines in July when it thwarted an attempt by a North Korean nation-state actor to infiltrate its software engineering staff. The company did hire the attacker, who used the stolen identity of a US citizen and deepf...

Kevin E. Greene is public sector CTO at OpenText Cybersecurity.  Prior to his current role, Kevin worked at the MITRE Corporation supporting DevSecOps initiatives for sponsors, ATT&CK research, and MITRE’s Common Weakness Enumeration program, and served as cyber research and development program manager at the US Department of Homeland Security. Kevin's research in Hybrid Analysis Mapping (HAM)...

Christopher Crowley is an independent consultant and senior instructor at the SANS Institute, who has 20 years of experience managing and securing networks. He is considered a leading expert in building a security operations center, or SOC, and authored the SANS 2024 SOC Survey report in May, which focused on the top challenges facing security operations. In this episode, Crowley's survey provides...

The number, magnitude and costs of cyberattacks have steadily escalated, year after year, for the last two decades as software has eaten the world. Fresh vendor products continue to proliferate to address increasingly sophisticated threats, but time-honored problems with human error, systems visibility and vulnerability remediation continue to plague security operations (SecOps) teams. When even t...

Josh Koenig and David Strauss are co-founders at Pantheon, a platform for building and operating websites. Josh is the chief strategy officer, and David is the CTO. Open source software is a big part of the web, and Pantheon is a downstream user as well as a contributor to several open source projects. David is an early contributor to systemd, a component of Linux distributions, a member of the Dr...

Justin Warren is founder and principal analyst at PivotNine, a technology consulting and analyst firm based in Melbourne, Australia. Until 2023, he was a board member at Electronic Frontiers Australia, a non-profit national organization representing Internet users. At KubeCon North America last year, he asked a press conference panel of enterprise IT leaders what they were doing to compensate open...

Emily Fox has held multiple roles at household-name organizations in her 13-year IT career and is currently senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Previously, she worked as an engineer at Apple, and DevOps Security Lead at the National Security Agency. She also serves as chair of the CNCF's technical oversight committee and is involved in a variety of open source communities and activities...