Jean Yang, CEO of Akita Software, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how she went from academia to tech founder, and what her company is doing to improve monitoring and observability. Jean explains why Akita is different from other observability & monitoring solutions, and how it bridges the gap from what people know they should be doing and what they actually do in practice. Corey and Jean explore why the monitoring and observability space has been so broken, and why it’s important for people to see monitoring as a chore and not a hobby. Jean also reveals how she took a leap from being an academic professor to founding a tech start-up. About JeanJean Yang is the founder and CEO of Akita Software, providing the fastest time-to-value for API monitoring. Jean was previously a tenure-track professor in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.Links Referenced:
Akita Software: https://www.akitasoftware.com/

Aki the dog chatbot: https://www.akitasoftware.com/blog-posts/we-built-an-exceedingly-polite-ai-dog-that-answers-questions-about-your-apis

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeanqasaur

TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I’m Corey Quinn. My guest today is someone whose company has… well, let’s just say that it has piqued my interest. Jean Yang is the CEO of Akita Software and not only is it named after a breed of dog, which frankly, Amazon service namers could take a lot of lessons from, but it also tends to approach observability slash monitoring from a perspective of solving the problem rather than preaching a new orthodoxy. Jean, thank you for joining me.Jean: Thank you for having me. Very excited.Corey: In the world that we tend to operate in, there are so many different observability tools, and as best I can determine observability is hipster monitoring. Well, if we call it monitoring, we can’t charge you quite as much money for it. And whenever you go into any environment of significant scale, we pretty quickly discover that, “What monitoring tool are you using?” The answer is, “Here are the 15 that we use.” Then you talk to other monitoring and observability companies and ask them which ones of those they’ve replace, and the answer becomes, “We’re number 16.” Which is less compelling of a pitch than you might expect. What does Akita do? Where do you folks start and stop?Jean: We want to be—at Akita—your first stop for monitoring and we want to be all of the monitoring, you need up to a certain level. And here’s the motivation. So, we’ve talked with hundreds, if not thousands, of software teams over the last few years and what we found is there is such a gap between best practice, what people think everybody else is doing, what people are talking about at conferences, and what’s actually happening in software teams. And so, what software teams have told me over and over again, is, hey, we either don’t actually use very many tools at all, or we use 15 tools in name, but it’s you know, one [laugh] one person on the team set this one up, it’s monitoring one of our endpoints, we don’t even know which one sometimes. Who knows what the thresholds are really supposed to be. We got too many alerts one day, we turned it off.But there’s very much a gap between what people are saying they’re supposed to do, what people in their heads say they’re going to do next quarter or the quarter after that and what’s really happening in practice. And what we saw was teams are falling more and more into monitoring debt. And so effectively, their customers are becoming their monitoring and it’s getting harder to catch up. And so, what Akita d