Guest: Kit Merker (LinkedIn)
Company: Nobl9 (Twitter)

Nobl9 has announced the availability of its Replay capability, which enables organizations to create service level objectives (SLOs) with historical data from the last 30 days, reducing wait time for data and making the feedback loop more efficient.

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk, Swapnil Bhartiya catches up with Kit Merker, Chief Operating Officer at Nobl9, to discuss the newest Nobl9 feature. He explains the current awareness around SLOs and how they are helping companies translate engineering activities, whether development or operations, into the business context of serving customers and ensuring efficiency.

Key highlights from this video interview:

• Customers are looking at cost efficiency in their stack. Merker says SLOs are a great tool to achieve this. Larger enterprises are adopting this approach as they embrace platform engineering.
• There has been a significant shift of awareness about SLOs in the past year. He explains how SLOs are helping companies get the insights they need to be able to run more efficiently.
• Nobl9 Replay allows users to look back in time, point to a data source, and build a SLO based on existing data. Merker says that if you already have SLI data and upstream systems and you want to build an SLO on that, you normally have to wait for the data to accumulate. With Nobl9 Replay, you can look back at historical data from the past 30 days.
• A second use case for Nobl9 Replay is debugging. It enables you to create an SLI query to create an SLO, but if it is an imperfect query, you can update the data that was collected before. This makes the process more productive with a faster feedback loop.
• With people constantly moving between different observability tools and stacks, Nobl9 enables you to create a mock-up of what that data would look like in two systems side by side. This enables people to ensure the queries match and it helps with the debugging cycle.
• Merker takes us through the SLO development lifecycle (SLODLC), explains that it is an open source set of templates that helps speed up the feedback loop and reduce wasted time. He mentions some of the tools that are helping organizations embrace modern development practices and how SLOs pull together all the pieces to build a business and serve customers better.
• Nobl9 will be at AWS re:Invent 2022 in Las Vegas to answer questions on how to get started with SLOs.

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.