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**Tom Wilkie:** Thank you very much, yeah. You know, I miss so much out of what's happened because unified alerting is a huge step in the Grafana story. I'm really pleased as the way the company came together. We used to have two alerting systems - we had the Grafana alerting system and the Prometheus alerting system. ... |
So I think it was really exciting how the team could combine the power of the Prometheus system, with multi-dimensional alerts, with alert managers routing, grouping and deduping and silencing... And bundle all these features into Grafana in a way that makes them easy to use and gives you that level of user experience ... |
I think the thing you said about cloud, the generous free tier, for instance - we launched that in January, I think... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. |
**Tom Wilkie:** We've always had a kind of free tier; we've always allowed you to have a free Grafana instance, for instance. The work that goes into actually being able to offer a free tier - there's so much going on behind the scenes, just at a very architectural level. |
The point I'd always make here is that you need the marginal cost of a new Prometheus instance, or of a new Loki instance, or of a new Tempo instance - you need it to be effectively zero. You can't offer a free tier unless the cost of the thing you're offering is as close to zero as possible. |
So this means behind the scenes we can't be spinning up a new Prometheus port or a new Loki port, or a new Grafana port, or a new Tempo port for every customer that signs up. That would get too expensive for us to offer. We're not that big a company yet. So fundamentally, the architecture of all of these systems has to... |
And that architecture has been replicated in Loki... Well, not replicated; it uses the same code, it uses the same module system, the same ring, the same architecture and the same techniques in Loki and in tempo. And that consistency across the offerings just also carries over to the kind of operational and cognitive b... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Everything you said makes a lot of sense to me, but I know that many people will be confused, because you are a VP of product. How on Earth does a VP of product know so many things about code and how things actually work? And I know that you're one of the Cortex co-authors. You've started Cortex... I ... |
**Tom Wilkie:** It was Julius, actually. The chap who was one of the original founders of the Prometheus project. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Julius Volz? |
**Tom Wilkie:** Julius Volz. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Right, okay. So you and Julius - you started Cortex, which went to grow, and I think it's part of a very important component of Grafana Cloud as an engine, an inspiration for Loki, which I think you also had something to do with, right? |
**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[12:08\] ...when you started the codebase. So how does that work? How can you be VP of product and code Go at a very advanced level? How does it work? |
**Tom Wilkie:** Titles in the abstract are pretty meaningless, right? So - yes, my title is VP of product, and I do have a lot of product management responsibilities in the company... But my background is a software engineer. I've been a software engineer now for 15-16 years, I've always worked on open source codebases... |
I started a company that got involved in the Cassandra distributed database, and then worked on Prometheus and Cortex. I've just always been a software engineer. I took a brief stint doing some engineering management at Google, some site reliability engineering, where I learned a lot about the whole monitoring side of ... |
I don't get to do as much software engineering now as it perhaps seems... I have a large team of software engineers who do that and really should take a lot more of the credit than perhaps I do... But you know, I did a few PRs yesterday; that was mostly on some kind of continuous deployment for some internal SLO dashbo... |
We had a hackathon recently internally, where everyone in the company took a week to code on whatever their imagination had been noodling over for the past few months... And I took part. That was pretty cool. I managed to get a couple of days of solid coding in. I'm not gonna tell you what the project was though, becau... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Interesting. I was just going to ask that, if any of those projects are public, but I'm sure the good ones will be, right? |
**Tom Wilkie:** No, some of them are. Bjorn and Dieter and Ganesh were working on -- one of their hackathon projects was high-definition histograms in Prometheus... And Ganesh has already tweeted about that, and will be putting out more information. The code is out there in public. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I've seen that. |
**Tom Wilkie:** There's a few of them that are public, and a lot of them are gonna form future projects, and potentially even future products. I can give you a bit of a hint what the project I was working on was. Not a lot of people know, at Grafana Labs - actually, its first time-series database that it built for Graf... |
And then I joined and brought Cortex in with me, and since then, of course, the architecture has now kind of moved towards a Cortex-style architecture. The Metrictank team within Grafana Labs, for the past year or so, have actually been working on putting a Graphite query engine on top of Cortex. And we've actually -- ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's fascinating. And now you reminded me the link between Acunu Analytics, the company that you were a part of at some point, and the startup that I was working for at the time, which was GoSquared, which was real-time visitor analytics. At GoSquared we were using MongoDB heavily, and we were start... |
**Tom Wilkie:** \[15:58\] Yeah. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** ...and I thought "Wow, this Graphite--" And scaling - those were fun days, challenging days. And I looked at Acunu and I thought "Wow, this is interesting. They're using Cassandra for the metrics and it works really well..." I remember even the demo that you gave -- I forget the conference name; this ... |
**Tom Wilkie:** Yeah, I don't remember back then. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** ...a long time ago. Something like that, yes. So Graphite was a great system, but it didn't really scale. It was very problematic. And then Grafana came along, but Grafana on top of Prometheus. So Prometheus had something to do with it. But Prometheus in its incipient phase was a single process, a sin... |
So I can see history in a way repeating itself with the Prometheus and Graphite, and now I can see the link, where it's actually part of Cortex, or it will be part of Cortex. That's really fascinating. |
**Tom Wilkie:** Well, it's interesting you mention that, because one of the things Acunu did, one of its contributions to the Cassandra project was a technique called virtual nodes, which is where in the earlier versions of Cassandra each node basically owned a single range in its distributed hash rate... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I remember that. |
**Tom Wilkie:** The technique that Acunu added, and it's been in Cassandra for ages now, was the ability for a node to own multiple ranges. And the whole principle there being once you can own multiple ranges - like hundreds - you then just pick them and random and you achieve a very good statistical load balancing. Wh... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** This makes me think of the old GoSquared team, because I remember Cassandra and how they were so excited about this... And this was mentioned like "Wow, this is amazing. Like, MongoDB? I think rather Cassandra." I remember that. And it wasn't even like version one at the time. I know that Netflix were... |
So let's take a step back from all these -- I won't say rabbit holes, but reminiscing specific things, which are a thing of the past, and let's come back into the present with a question which I know very many people are... I'm not sure whether struggling with, but they are, you know -- there are two sides to them. Wha... |
**Tom Wilkie:** I mean, it's definitely a bit of an industry buzzword right now. The three pillars definition is not that useful of a definition. It doesn't really describe what you're trying to do, or what the problem you're trying to solve. It more describes maybe how you're solving some other problem. So whilst I do... |
I've always really liked the definition of "Observability is the name for the movement that is helping engineers understand the behavior of their applications and their infrastructure. It's about any tool, any source of data, any technique that helps you understand how a large and complicated distributed system is beha... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I've been thinking about this for a couple of years... I had a couple of interesting discussions. Even the episode before this, that's a really interesting one; if this is the first one that you're listening to, check that out, see how the two compare for you... But I also agree that being curious abo... |
**Tom Wilkie:** \[20:27\] It's an interesting kind of way of phrasing it, because what I think we really internalize at Grafana Labs is kind of avoiding a one-size-fits-all solution. So I know there are some incredibly powerful solutions out there that are incredibly flexible, but at the end of the day we internally ca... |
The way I've always thought about it is when you get paged in the middle of the night, I don't want a system to tell me necessarily what's wrong, because the reality is if a system could tell me what's wrong, it'll probably be able to fix it for me, and I probably should have thought of it ahead of time, and it probabl... |
So really, I'm not looking for a tool that claims to automate root cause analysis, or tell me exactly what's broken... Because if it can do that, it probably shouldn't have broken in that particular way. |
I'm looking for a tool that helps me test theories that I've got. "Oh, is it broken because of this? Oh, I can correlate some metrics and some logs, and I can see if that's the case." Is it broken because there's a tiny little service running on a computer onto someone's desk that's gone down? Oh, I can go and look at ... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's great. |
**Break**: \[22:52\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** I really liked your last answer, and I think now is a great time to start looking at the Grafana ecosystem, the Grafana Labs, Cloud... Just because Grafana means many things. How would you solve specific problems with the tools that you have available in Grafana? So let's take a specific example... Le... |
Let's imagine this is a monolithic application, Changelog.com. I'm winking righ now... It's a Phoenix app... So what would I do? |
**Tom Wilkie:** Actually, I don't know what Phoenix is. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It's a framework similar to Ruby on Rails, but it's based in Elixir, which - the syntax is similar to Ruby, but it's really running on the Erlang VM. |
**Tom Wilkie:** Wow. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So it's like Ruby on Rails. |
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