Guest: Mike Kelly (LinkedIn)
Company: observIQ (Twitter)

Many companies find themselves grappling with a huge amount of telemetry data on a daily basis, made even further challenging by compliance and regulations. We are seeing more vendors realize the need for a unified telemetry layer to help handle the influx and data and better manage costs. 

In this episode of TFiR: Let’s Talk recorded at the 2023 KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in Amsterdam, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Mike Kelly, CEO of observIQ, to discuss the changes we are seeing in the compliance space and how companies are ensuring they are staying within the regulations, particularly in the EU. He introduces us to observIQ and talks about their recent announcement of the cloud version of BindPlane OP. He goes into detail about the trends they are seeing with telemetry data and what they are doing to help people better control their data and reduce their data costs. 

• Kelly talks about how it is great to meet people in person who are also focused on open-source observability and OpenTelemetry Project. He talks about the momentum he is seeing with some of the core projects from last year’s KubeCon and how they are gaining greater understanding.  
• observIQ has announced the cloud version of BindPlaneOP at KubeCon having launched an open-source version late last year followed by the enterprise version. Kelly discusses the motivation behind the cloud version and how they now have a quick way for people to get started with BindPlane.
• Kelly explains how EU compliance differs compared to the US, such as needing to stay within the regulations. He talks about how they work with organizations that have high compliance needs and how observIQ ensures those company ship data just where they need it to go and within regulations. 
• Kelly feels that there is almost a step back from cloud right now; however, they are seeing faster adoption of some of the projects in the EU than there has been in the past, with a lot of core contributors to the projects based in the EU. He talks about how Kubernetes levels the playing field since it does not matter what cloud you are using. 
• OpenTelemetry Project is seeing vendors come together, and whereas in the past they had competing standards, now we are seeing a shift towards going forward with some core standards, including OpenTelemetry. Kelly explains how more vendors are adding an observability pipeline or control layer, and the need for a unified telemetry layer. 
• observIQ is still relatively new and this is the company’s first KubeCon Europe. The company focuses on developing the unified telemetry layer. Kelly talks about the benefits of standardizing how you are collecting all the telemetry data and controlling it. He likens it to the CI/CD revolution and how it helps organizations iterate faster. 
• observIQ started out focusing on making configuration management easier but has recently shifted towards also looking at how to reduce the data. Kelly discusses how their additional functionality such as log deduplication and metric statistics helps achieve this without impacting the visibility. 

This summary was written by Emily Nicholls.