Video: How Shoreline.io Aims To Revolutionize Incident Response

hey Channel insiders welcome back to channel Insider partner POV your source for untapped opportunities and unfiltered opinions in the it Channel all to help you make Better Business decisions I'm your host Katie boso my guest today is Christine Newman vice president of marketing at that aims to make monitoring and managing Cloud operations easier it's like having an automated digital assistant keeping an eye on your Cloud tools and remediating well-known issues so you can focus on running your business hi Christine welcome hi Katie thank you for having me today I appreciate it thank you so much for being here it's great to meet you great to talk about this exciting product that Shoreline is brought to the market so why don't you tell me a little bit about shoreline.net and and what exactly is your solution sure absolutely well how technical is your audience here because is definitely the most technical company I've ever worked with so it really depends there right and it's you know you start looking at Solutions like Shoreline and you're kind of going into the very far depths of computers and infrastructures and solutioning and tools that help keep all of these systems running you know we work with devops teams and Sr teams the the folks that keep the the production infrastructure up and running prevent outages and we enable them with automations in a way that they typically don't use in the production environment they've got tools like observability that help them find problems in their infrastructure they've got alerting systems ticketing systems they use communication tools like slack or teams to talk about the problems they're seeing right but when it comes time for them to get their hands dirty get into the systems and apply fixes many times a lot of those processes are manual and it's um you know there's an element of we simply don't trust automation to handle some of the problems in production systems because they're so critical to these companies right and outage can cost and there's you know many recorded types of outages right you've got companies like uh you know Twitter having an outage and you've got company Airlines having outages right these can cost millions of you know not tens of millions of dollars to these companies um when they have an outage and so it's it's a very sensitive type of role um it Shoreline uh is you know is founded by uh honor gupa our CEO and founder he used to work at AWS and what he found was that automation wasn't the risk right you would build these automations based on repeatable processes known risks in the system and then known ways to solve those risks or problems he would build up these processes and the automation actually reduced the risk right reduced some of the risk of of humans um being able to SSH into some of these systems and those are security risks there's risks of outages just from um errors and things like that so shine does automated incident remediation and resolution it pairs with observability tools like data dog it works with alerting tools like pag your duty service now and it works with your Tex St that you use for your infrastructure and applies automations to create more efficient resolutions and remediations for incidents and really it saves devops Sr teams tons of time I we've seen you know a time to resolve an incident go from s hours to 5 minutes if not less wow it sounds like this is the observability tool of observability tools observability right is such a specific thing right observing incidents is great you know you can sit there and observe 10 incidents 100 incidents a thousand incidents when you start thinking about scaling a system there's only so many incidents that you can observe at some point you have to do something about them right like who's going to do all and these clouds are getting bigger and more complicated and you're running different services and VMS and how do you now scale and you can hire more people to help resolve some of these incidents but the fact is is that you know we've got clients that they take 20 people get them on a phone call and the first thing they're doing is say okay we have an alert right the dis size is overrun we've got pods that are growing right how do we get on this phone call and now resolve it right and everybody gets on a phone and it's 20 people and they're all Hands-On keyboards what do we need to look into right and it's how do you take any type of Automation and get them from the point where before they even jump on the phone call before that alert is even going out to the team to get it far enough along maybe to the point where the um alarm is even resolved like that incident is resolved maybe just to the point where you know more about what happened with that alert where it happened what other types of incidents were correlated with it I think that's really important to point out because I wanted to know you know what makes this stand out and in the story of like you said your CEO does come from AWS so he's probably seen a ton of things go wrong in his career as far as when he sees the problems that his customers have was there a moment in time where Shoreline was born as an idea and there was that moment where he said this is this can't continue and this is how we're going to address this it was born while you know in his head while he was AWS right and it was based on his ethos of continuous innovation so the way that honor OG was thinking about it is how do we you know how do we apply software to our production operations right in a way that hadn't been done previously in a way that creates um the type of force multiplier that you need to scale right so he was constantly trying to apply software where he could where there were typically manual processes um and what he realized was that hyperscalers like AWS right can do this they can take a team of hundreds of people and apply software that way other companies can't they're still at a place where they're hiring to resolve these problems they're hiring more and more team members to resolve these problems but the clouds are becoming more complex they're growing if you're a company and you're you know trying to service two or three new clients those customers are you know four times bigger than the ones you've serviced before now of a sudden you're in a place where you're trying to grow your team just so you can fix the incidents that you're expecting to happen uh that's a really challenging process to be in and and getting those developers up to speed um making them as good as your best devops teams that would be very challenging to do so you really need to be thinking about how to automate things like this and make sure that your team is focused on either Innovation focused on new product updates right or at least able to keep up with the workload absolutely and you mentioned about scaling you can't do that with people in this day and age just considering the shortage of talent that we're seeing in the itet Market in general so completely understand that do you happen to know the amount of alerts or the amount of tools that your average customer is trying to run all at once when they come to you what are they typically saying are they like there's just so much and we don't know how to see it all and take care of it uh you know it's I would love to sit here and say it's in the thousands I'm sure it's more than that it's not there's no typical and at the end of the day what we try to do is we try to take the thousands of alerts that anybody's generally looking at with their observability tools and figure out what are the 20% of issues that are happening that are causing the most problems that are taking the most time so we typically use our AI tools to correlate a bunch of different incidents together find out where those patterns are and then map it to um the the information that we're getting from alerting system so we can figure out how much time is spent on particular issues right so if it's typically taking you know 10 engineers uh 10 hours each to resolve right okay now we have a quantity for how problematic how much toil these particular incidents are causing right and then we can compare that and contrast that to other incidents that are happening in production by using that methodology we can start fixing the most problematic problems right the ones that will give us the higher return so that's how we think about it right because you know trying to boil the ocean would be awfully challenging so it's really about identifying those those next most um you know the incidents that cause the the most oil and that involves a ton of artificial intelligence that's sewn into Shoreline doio to make sure that it's following all of this so could we also talk about the hyperscalers that help to run or power Shoreline Doo who who are your Partnerships um there I'm assuming AWS right we run on top of AWS Services um so we'll go to market together in a partnership and apply solutions for any fast growing company anybody you know either switching over to a cloud infrastructure or changing the way they're thinking about their Cloud infrastructure and we and we partner with uh gcp Azure right as well um AWS is certainly the primary though I hear when people quote unquote leave AWS they don't they don't go very far they're still in the family so I imagine Hog's connections there are are really special still and just how does that separate you from the crowd being able to have that partnership with AWS what is that like well AWS partners with quite a few vendors so it's not that special honog does have a bit of uh celebrity status in the AWS community and that's because he ran some pretty big products for AWS so reinvent is one of those places where he gets stopped you know every five feet on the street and people saying hey I worked with you oh hey how's it G I heard you over at Shoreline so that does separate us because of what he was able to achieve uh within a AWS in terms of going to Market with our Channel Partners I you know I think it's it's a busy space right now there's a lack of competition in what Shoreline does specifically I think about us as a tool that works with the other standard tools that anybody is using to manage their infrastructure but at the end of the day we're for the most mature most fast growing right um anybody who's evolving their Cloud infrastructure that's where shorelines use cas really apply so the differentiation is a bit different than typically how AWS thinks about the world and you mentioned about Channel Partners I'd like to talk a bit more about that channel overlap with shoreline.net customers and solve problemss and if not that's also just as much an answer absolutely uh I think we are very much in the early stages of evolving our Channel partnership strategy and we are absolutely looking for folks to work with in this space Shoreline is um is the type of technology that would really work well with a with a channel partner um we'd love we'd love to see more frankly is there a way that you encourage Channel Partners to reach out and learn more or get in touch with you to be able to say like hey what can we do how can we speed up that process yeah they can reach out to me individually they can shoot an email to hello Shor line.io uh visit our website we're still a relatively small team so we'll be pretty responsive I think and you see the pings and Christine I would love to paint a picture of success here so could you tell me about a customer success story in which Shoreline was able to help solve a problem absolutely so one of my more recent favorites is we work with a company called razor pay based out of in India they're a leading payments aggregator and they process about hundred billion dollar of transactions annually with 10 million Merchants what the team was trying to do was they were trying to conserve some of their resources right um they're also trying to eliminate some of the risk to their system an outage for a payments processor like that would be catastrophic right so they want to implement Shoreline reduce the amount of risk reduce the amount of outages and speed up their teams capability right um in the industry it's called mttr it's median time to resist resolve and what that means is that every incident is measured by the amount of time it takes to resolve it right and this can be average 7 hours we went in there and our objective was to try to bring down the amount of time uh it took to resolve an incident we're able to move this from you know 7 hours to 5 minutes for certain incidents right and what it translates to is a 20 to 25% Improvement in productivity for every single devops person on that team wow that's significant so what that looks like is that in a typical day there would be an alert alert that would happen everybody in the team would jump on a call to understand if it was a high priority alert where did it happen what happened everybody is hands on a keyboard you've got you know let's say a team of 10 10 folks right Engineers you've got sres and everybody's looking to see where the problem lies Shoreline hooked into the alert system and ran a run book that checked all of the different systems understood you know where the incident was happening what the historical reasons would be right and created an entire debugging process such that the time that everybody jumps on the call is now you know still that same amount of time they all jump on the call but now they already know where it happened and what happened so you've got your full debugging script right there and you can go back now resolving an incident and we already know that you know resolving an incident is actually doesn't take as much amount of time as debugging the incident right debugging the incident doing that investigation is actually quite hard right because you're looking for a needle and a hay stack at times that's exactly it yeah for those that are listening and they're going this might be something I need in my business how can they kind of identify that checklist of things that are happening within their business to go yeah I I think I need to get in touch with Shoreline so what we see is is that uh many of our customers will be at a place where they're trying to scale their infrastructure right they're introducing new uh CPUs into their infrastructure they've got new customers that are coming in um that they're worried about the new complexities that are being added there uh they're moving to the cloud for example and we see a lot of that strain put on the on call team put on the devops teams to resolve some of these issu faster and what ends up happening is is that there's you know either a couple of teams or a couple of Engineers that are trying to kind of make their own Homegrown Solutions toward Automation and it starts to get a bit fractured on the teams right you've got some teams running some types of automation sometimes and in some way and that that promise of automation is there but it can't be rolled out across the entire devops organization that's where Shoreline really fits in nicely is when the team is ready for Automation and they don't quite know how to implement it and like I said right we start at the most critical incidents the ones that are causing the most toil and knock those out and start going down that list right so we free up time from that top of the list and and go through that list next and talk to me a little bit more about the ability to scale that I mean if your customers are growing literally overnight can Shoreline keep up with that growth absolutely and that's the objective there too right so um in order to keep up with the growth right we begin automating tasks so once you start saving some of that that Sr time right you're saving people seven hours per incident all of a sudden now you have a massive amount of man-hours to apply to other things right because we've resolved some of those more repetitive incidents we've resolved the common incidents we've resolved the ones that are happening consistently we've resolved the ones that are taking up the most time time so the first thing you get is time back very important time is money that is something we all have to consider time is money and Shoreline operates ac across an entire fleet too which means that you know instead of having uh developers sshing into every different box we would be able to apply that automation run across all of those systems at the same time um so there's time saved in that area as well let's talk about your job as VP of marketing Christine this is a story that it's I still think it's funny you in the beginning you asked me how technical is your audience how deep should I go into this so what do you keep in mind when you go to market with shoreline.edu than an engineer is speaking there's an entirely different type of activity that um I don't take place in on a regular basis luckily in my distant past I did have um some technical experience um and I've worked with Engineers for most of my career so I have a bit of reverence for that position like that's a really important thing to get across right my role as a marketer is to speak to the value is to speak to the pain is to speak to the differentiators of Shoreline to help folks Orient where the slute fits right especially my background is product marketing too right really think through our positioning and our potential and how we work as part of a larger ecosystem so that when an engineer is now speaking to another engineer and talking about a shoreline implementation right that gets super technical that get you know talks about the product right um and that can be you know a secondary conversation an add-on conversation but it's always helpful to talk to that sort of 10-year-old version of every person who's like look I'm I'm having a challenge here and I need a solution and what do you have for me Christine my my last question today would just be how do we get in touch with you if we'd like to learn more about Shoreline Doo Shoreline io. is our website address so you can find us there you can find more information about our products there um and you can find contact details for any of our team Christine it's been a pleasure speaking to you and I appreciate your time today you too Katie thanks so much for having me I appreciate it thanks to Christine for joining me today and thank you for watching or listening you can check out all episodes of Channel Insider partner POV on our website Channel insider.com or watch us on YouTube at Channel Insider newws and Trends you can also listen to the show in podcast format on your preferred podcast listening platform don't forget to like subscribe and follow wherever possible so you never miss an episode we put out a new video and podcast every week you can connect with us on LinkedIn or Twitter or you can email me to be on the show at partner poov Channel insider.com once again I'm Katie boso and I'll see you next time

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