Nobl9 Offers Open Beta Access to World’s First ‘SLO Platform’

Oct 29, 2020 | Author: Nobl9

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UPDATE: Nobl9 is now GA. Try it today

Originally published at Cision on October 29th, 2020

Platform helps Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) develop Service Level Objectives (SLOs) to ensure customer happiness, based on objective economic value of service availability.

BOSTON, October 29, 2020 — Nobl9, the software reliability platform startup, today opened access to its first-of-its-kind platform for software reliability in a public beta. The Nobl9 Service Level Objective Platform had previously been available only to a select group of several dozen early evaluators. The software-as-a-service offering is the world’s first SLO-centric solution that transforms reliability metrics into actionable business KPIs via a modern engineering workflow.

Nobl9 is dedicated to helping software companies use the SLO approach to make smart decisions that deliver real business impact.

Keeping Customers Happy Requires Software Reliability

Businesses need happy customers in order to survive. To keep customers happy, infrastructure teams need to meet reliability goals efficiently. Web-scale companies pioneered Software Reliability Engineering (SRE) and the service level objective (SLO) method to create an extremely scalable relationship between operational staff and software services while maintaining customer loyalty and cost controls. Nobl9 is bringing a simplified variation on this methodology to every software team.

The Nobl9 Service Level Objective Platform helps organizations use SLOs to efficiently deliver software reliability. Nobl9 works with existing monitoring systems like Datadog, New Relic, and others to collect the critical metrics that matter most to users and business stakeholders. These metrics are measured against business-justified reliability targets that both clarify and limit the cost of reliability. Nobl9 calculates budgets of acceptable error per service threshold and can trigger workflows and alerts in anticipation of outages. This system helps software and business teams together deliver reliable features faster and at a reasonable cost.

“Every company—and especially companies who deliver software—must make wise resource allocation decisions and balance tradeoffs between speed and reliability,” said Marcin Kurc, co-founder and CEO of Nobl9. “The companies who do this well gain a clear upperhand in the marketplace. Nobl9 is dedicated to helping software companies use the SLO approach to make smart decisions that deliver real business impact. We do this by providing data-driven insights into the customer experience. Our platform helps business executives and the teams building and running applications find that ‘sweet spot’ that simultaneously maximizes customer happiness and business results.”

The Nobl9 Service Level Platform lets technology executives look at their engineering culture and system holistically by providing a central system-of-record for service ownership, reliability goals, and the historical track record of service health. The platform gives a strategic view of how to best run services to optimize for the critical tradeoffs: speed of delivery, technical debt, and redundant infrastructure cost.

Key Capabilities of the Nobl9 Service Level Platform

The Nobl9 Service Level Platform:

1. Collects Service Level Indicator (SLI) data from external monitoring, providing a “signal boost.” When reliability is the aim, the goal is not having the most metrics to monitor, but about monitoring the right metrics. Knowing which metrics are impacting customer experience can cut monitoring storage costs by 80% as well as focus attention on what truly matters.

Nobl9 collects the key metrics from existing monitoring systems including Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus and more. These SLIs (aka service KPIs) can be used to measure and trigger action related to reliability issues across the stack.

2. Provides a reliability feedback loop with real-time and historical reporting. Correlating reliability goals to signals of business success or failure enables SRE teams to proactively tackle early warning of increased errors—before an outage erupts. A proactive solution prevents damaged reputations, violated Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and lost customers.

With the Nobl9 Service Level Platform, SRE teams can figure out how to make systems more reliable based on data, or, conversely, lower reliability goals to save money when systems are overbuilt. The Nobl9 Service Level Platform provides real-time and historical reports, indicating clear, data-driven answers to critical questions like, “should we focus on features or technical debt?” and “are we wasting money on excessive cloud resources?” End result: achieving the right balance of speed, safety and spend.

3. Enables user and time period segmentation. Software end users expect the best service, but most will forgive minor issues. During critical times—such as at first sign up or during the holiday shopping season—reliable service is a necessity, whereas minor issues at other times are less likely to cause frustration and customer churn.

The Nobl9 Service Level Platform allows organizations to create business rules and define “facets” of users to fully understand their needs and experiences. Using the platform, SRE teams can identify individuals that are struggling, create and track groups of users from a single location or company, define critical business periods, and codify contractual obligations (SLAs) so that the organization can focus on delivering the right service across digital interfaces.

4.Improves the developer experience. The Nobl9 Service Level Platform was designed to solve business problems, but it was crafted to make life easier for engineers. For example, the Nobl9 Service Level Platform provides a CLI/GUI/API for everything, Kubernetes-like YAML SLO-as-Code, and a sloctl command line.

Demo Videos Offer a Preview of the Nobl9 Service Level Platform

To sign up for the public beta, visit nobl9.com/signup.

About Nobl9

Nobl9, the software reliability platform startup, is in the noble pursuit of reliable software. Founded by Marcin Kurc and Brian Singer, who joined Google via acquisition of Orbitera, Nobl9 helps software developers, DevOps practitioners, and reliability engineers deliver reliable features faster through software-defined Service Level Objectives that link monitoring and other logging and tracing data to user happiness and business KPIs. The company is backed by Battery Ventures, CRV, Bonfire, and Resolute Ventures and is headquartered in Boston with a distributed team. More at nobl9.com.