Taking System Monitoring to the Next Level: an Interview with Scalyr CEO Steve Newman

Petros Koutoupis — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 13:00:00 +0000

As computing ecosystems become more complex, monitoring and analyzing those often disconnected moving parts becomes increasingly challenging.

Today's data center has evolved from a single supplier producing and selling all-in-one offerings, such as the days when EMC, NetApp, HP or even Sun owned your data center and you chose a vendor and stuck with it. Those same vendors provided you with the required tools to monitor, analyze and troubleshoot their entire stack.

Shifting focus to the present, the landscape now appears to be quite different. Instead, you will find environments of mixed offerings provided by an assortment of vendors, both large and small. Proprietary machines work side by side with off-the-shelf commodity devices hosting software-defined software. Half of your applications may be hosted in virtual machines over a hypervisor or just spun up in a container. How does a modern data-center administrator or DevOps professional manage such an environment?

An assortment of platforms and frameworks exist that provide such capabilities, but they're not all one and the same. In some cases, those same tools will need to be coupled with others to produce something useful (for example, ELK: Elasticsearch + Logstash + Kibana). Unfortunately, this arrangement just adds to the complication and frustration when attempting to diagnose or discover problems in your computing environment.

Putting an end to this level of complexity, one company stands out among the rest: Scalyr. Scalyr develops and offers a complete suite of server monitoring, log management, visualization and analysis tools, which integrate with cloud services. I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Scalyr CEO Steve Newman.

His is not a household name, like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but you will be familiar with his work and contributions to cloud-enabled technologies. Although this is likely to change with Scalyr, Steve is best known for his work with Writely, a technology that later was acquired by Google and relabeled as Google Docs. In our conversation, Steve and I took the opportunity to discuss Scalyr, its solution and the problem it solves.

Steve Newman, Scalyr CEO

Petros Koutoupis: Tell me a bit about yourself. Who is Steve Newman?

Steve Newman: I am an engineer by both training and background and have spent most of my career in the startup environment. This is because I enjoy building things. I was at Google for a number of years following an acquisition, and while the experience itself was great, the startup bug in me drove me to Scalyr.

PK: So, now you founded a company called Scalyr. Please tell us, what is Scalyr?

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Developer Interview: Ronald “wattOS” Ropp

Michael Reed — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Biff Baxter, real name Ronald Ropp, is a technology consultant based in Portland, Oregon. He's also the developer behind wattOS, an Ubuntu derived Linux distribution (see our overview). We were quite impressed with wattOS, so we got in contact with him for some Q+A.

How did you get involved with Linux?

I got involved in Linux a long time ago. I loaded Slackware 1.1 from a CD (that I copied to floppies) in the back of a web server book that I bought in 1995. I was setting up my first web server, and I had an unused 486DX2 50MHz machine that I loaded it on. I had no UI, and I didn't not know what to do with it when done, but it worked. From there it grew, and I moved to RedHat for a year or two, then to SuSE for a while, then on to the wonderful world of Distro hopping. Everything from Slackware to Gentoo etc. I got involved in security and ISP and networking work and it was a perfect platform for that.

How did wattOS come about?

I grew frustrated with Windows 95 and the constant upgrade cycle, money required, memory, bloat, viruses, etc. I was taking old Dell Optiplex desktop machines and installing Vector Linux on them to make a fast secure simple platform for people to use. I would get a lot of 10 of them from a local recycler, install Vector Linux on them and sell them on eBay or simply give them to people.

What is the ethos behind wattOS?

The goal is to balance responsiveness, function and footprint and to maintain a somewhat minimalist interface so you do not lose a quick, efficient way to move around your apps and desktop space while not having to be a command line ninja to do so.

From the beginning, my intent for wattOS (which I first released in July 2008) was to create a simple, fast desktop that can leverage the large Debian/Ubuntu knowledge base and repositories. I've tried to keep it somewhat minimal, while being as functional as possible for the average user. I don't want them to have to do a ton of command line work just to do the basics such as web, email, music, video, print, photos, word processing, chat, etc.

I've also created (or included) some basic tools to help minimize power use. Additionally, there are a ton of systems sitting unused, in closets, being scrapped, etc that are perfectly functional, and people who do not have a lot of money would be thrilled to have them.

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interview

Taking System Monitoring to the Next Level: an Interview with Scalyr CEO Steve Newman

Developer Interview: Ronald “wattOS” Ropp