Gartner analyst Gregg Siegfried reflects on the previous generation of AIOps tools that never quite lived up to their "NoOps" promise, looks at how generative AI tools have already affected IT ops pros' day to day work, and predicts the ways AI agents are poised to even more dramatically alter the observability and IT automation landscape.…

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 futu…

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, b…

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…

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 than…

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…

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 featur…

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 loo…

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 vend…

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 …

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 product…

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 distri…

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 fo…

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 presid…

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 fre…

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 Sta…

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 ser…

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 o…

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. …

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 …

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. Kevi…

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 oper…

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 plag…

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 co…

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 …

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…

How is open source sustainability similar to the subprime mortgage crisis? And what can an episode of South Park teach us about open product business models? Dan Lorenc has a uniquely multifaceted view of these and other questions – he worked at Google from 2012 to 2021, began contributing to open source projects in the Kubernetes community in 2016…

Tobie Langel is Principal and Managing Partner at UnlockOpen, a consulting firm in Geneva that advises clients on working with the open tech ecosystem. Langel is a passionate advocate for open source, and in February, he gave a presentation at the­ State of Open Conference in London urging funding for open source maintainers. Here, he discusses the…

Bruce Perens created the definition of open source and co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998. He has said in recent public interviews, however, that open source has failed, and called for its overhaul under his Post-Open project. In this episode, Beth caught up with him to hear more about his ideas for the world after open source.…

Adam Jacob is CEO and co-founder of System Initiative, an infrastructure automation software startup that came out of stealth in 2023. Previously, he was co-founder and CTO of Chef Software, which also focused on infrastructure automation, and was sold to Progress Software in 2020. Chef had roots in open source, and underwent a license change in 20…

Alexis Richardson co-founded a company in 2014 called Weaveworks, which created an open source GitOps project called Flux CD. In February, the company ceased operations, despite having gained new customers in 2023. Among the events that precipitated the closure of the business were acquisition talks with a larger company that fell through "at the 1…

William Morgan is CEO at Buoyant, a company that sells commercial and SaaS support for the Linkerd service mesh project and employs all of its maintainers. In February, Buoyant announced it would no longer be making a certain class of the project's code, called stable release artifacts, available for free to production users with more than 50 emplo…

Chad Whitacre is head of open source at Sentry, an application and performance monitoring software maker that moved to a business source license for its products in 2019, and then to a functional source license in November 2023. Most recently, Chad has been working on a new project called Software Commons over the last six months, with the goal of …

I'm Beth Pariseau, senior news writer at TechTarget, and this is IT Ops Query, a new podcast that distills the signal from the noise about enterprise digital transformation and IT operations. In this first season, I'm talking to guests about the ongoing friction between open source software principles and sustainability. Join me March 28 for a seri…