I joined Chronosphere as an Engineering Manager in January after spending the past five and a half years at Palantir, where I led the observability team. My team was responsible for building and maintaining the infrastructure which enabled our engineers to observe and monitor their systems, debug issues as they occurred, and resolve problems in a timely manner. Our production fleet consisted of hundreds of thousands of pods running at any given point in time. Anybody who’s worked with distributed systems at this scale understands the criticality of good observability tooling: without highly available and reliable monitoring systems, you and the business are flying blind.
Chronosphere first appeared on my radar through this previous role, where one of the largest ongoing pain points for my team was managing the metrics usage of other engineering teams in the organization. It was all too easy for a developer to add a line of code which inadvertently blew up their metrics cardinality, and along with it, our observability bill.
When I first joined the observability team at Palantir, we relied on in-house tooling built on top of our own data platform to monitor metrics usage on a per-team basis. While partially automated, it still required human intervention to resolve the issues that inevitably surfaced. This solution required an ongoing and active energy investment and failed to effectively “put the pebble in the shoe” of the teams instrumenting their services in an inefficient manner, where the value derived from the metrics was not proportionate with the cost.
My team built tooling that programmatically dropped low-value metrics, but I was intrigued by the opportunity to build generalized versions of such solutions at Chronosphere. I had a deep understanding of the frustrations experienced as a member of the central observability team. Chronosphere offered capabilities to manage metrics usage out of the box that I’d wished I had on my own team. This stood out to me as a game-changer in a highly competitive observability landscape, and I was convinced that their product would all but sell itself.
Conviction in the product seeded my initial interest, and the opportunity to participate in solving organizational problems at a quickly-growing early stage startup sealed the deal. My previous company had over 3,000 employees when I left. Chronosphere had closer to 100 people when I joined this past January and we’ve since doubled in size.
While at Palantir, I had an amazing mentor who taught me the characteristics of an effective Engineering Manager over the course of several years. I was frequently outside of my comfort zone and it was a trial by fire at times, but my mentor gave me the tools and coaching I needed to solve hard engineering and leadership problems. The lessons that stuck with me the most were those which were learned through painful failures. However, the growth I experienced during these periods of discomfort was unparalleled. Toward the end of my tenure at the company, the periods of discomfort waned and my own growth tapered. I knew it was time for me to find a place where I could both continue to grow independently and also pass along the lessons and skills that I had learned.
Since starting at Chronosphere, I’ve ramped up on three engineering teams and had an opportunity to apply the same lessons about building well-oiled software development machines in different contexts on a far more condensed timeline. I’ve been exposed to new problems, such as how to foster collaborative relationships between engineering and the field, and how to construct an effective hiring pipeline. However, the most unique set of challenges have come from remote work.
This was the first time that I joined a company remotely and it presented a unique set of additional challenges. I didn’t fully appreciate how much harder it is to ramp up and feel connected to the broader company in a remote-first environment. You lose out on all of the organic interactions which occur in the office and there isn’t a well-established playbook for how to bridge this gap, particularly at scale. In response to these new challenges, we’re experimenting with creative ways to build a strong culture in our distributed workforce, with efforts ranging from the highly local, such as supporting grassroots team clusters that we see forming in local coworking spaces, to global, such as holding company-wide events in virtual reality. This is at the cutting edge of how we work, and we get to pave the path at Chronosphere. The camaraderie is real.
The past nine months have gone by in a blur. At the same time, it feels like far more has happened than what deserves to reasonably fit within this timeframe, in the best way possible. I can’t wait to see what the future has in store.
If any of this resonates with you, there might be a place for you at Chronosphere. Reach out and let’s chat.
In this Meet the Team profile, we chat with Luke Tillman, located in Denver, Colorado, on what it’s like to be a front-end engineer on the platform team. Luke, who is well-versed in open-sourcing, joined Chronosphere and was actually one of the first hires on the UI team. Catch up on the whole chat with Chris Ward. Below are a few highlights.
I’m a front-end engineer – a UI engineer – on the platform team. So, I work on our cloud product, but on the front end. We have a handful of other folks that also do UI work – they aren’t full-time front-end or UI engineers, but most of the UI folks work on the platform on the cloud.
I was one of the first two UI engineers hired. There were two things. When I started looking at Chronosphere, one aspect that jumped out at me immediately was the chance to work with cool distributed systems tech again. I have a little bit of background there. When I was looking at M3, our open source database that the tech is built around, it reminded me a lot of Cassandra – which is something that I worked with at a previous company.
The biggest reason that I ended up joining was the people. When I interviewed, everybody was just super kind and empathetic and it was really obvious even in the interview process. It gave me a chance to work with Sterling – the head of our UX who I adore, and we worked together at a previous company. The people are really what drew me and what keeps me around even a year and a half later.
I’ve been in tech for about twenty years now. I guess that dates me. I started out more full-stack, and spent a bunch of time in the . NET space. I wrote a lot of C# in my early days.
I kind of burned out on tech in my twenties, and three years in my late twenties I just quit tech completely. I was a bartender for three years which was actually a lot of fun.
Most recently, I was at a company called DataStax, where I worked on all things Apache Cassandra-related. That was fun.
I also joined DevRel. I was a developer advocate for the first three years. It was something I had never done before. I got to go around and travel, give talks, and teach which I really enjoyed. I eventually went back to engineering full-time.
It has to do with the scale of data that our customers are working with. Working with distributed databases, there’s a certain set of challenges that you don’t have unless you’re working at a bigger scale that some of these technologies solve. When you’re dealing with a huge scale of data, we think about things like: “How do you present a huge volume of data in a meaningful way?” It gets more challenging when you’re dealing with a scale that some of our customers have – or even making sure that things in the front-end perform. And that’s something you don’t get to do at every job.
I’m on a new dashboard work stream that has been rolling for a little while. I’m doing most of my work right now in an open source project called Perses – where we’re building a dashboarding solution. It’s a lot of fun, and an opportunity to work in open source again. I’m having a good time building dashboarding from scratch.
A friend of mine from grade school moved out here to Denver before I did and really got into the craft brewing scene and wanted to open his own brewery. I got the chance to invest a teeny tiny bit of money, so I own a little bit of a craft brewery here in Denver – called Downhill Brewing.
There is this project called Cue Lang. It’s a really interesting way of defining contracts for things – like our configuration of APIs. You can define structures, and get all sorts of validation and code generations for free. It’s a cool little piece of technology that I’ve been playing around with recently.
I would be a dog. My wife and I have two and I adore them. I think I would live my best life eating, sleeping and playing. We have two lhasa apsos that have Ewok faces.
I’d say my parents played a huge role at different points and for different reasons. Early on, my Mom is the one who really instilled my work ethic and a love for learning that I still have to this day. She got me reading at a really young age – fiction and things like that. That’s something that I still do every day, before I go to bed.
Later on in life, my dad played a huge role. My Dad’s been a software engineer for about forty years now. He works for Pivotal, in open source projects. He’s been a wealth of knowledge and really helpful at talking through things with me. Tech is a family business for us. My other two brothers have done coding boot camps.
I asked my wife this last night. I don’t really have a quote. If I had a quote, it would probably be from a movie. It would have to be “Runaway!!!” from Monty Python, the Holy Grail.
Listen in to hear Chris and Luke’s entire conversation:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Brandon Bright, Account Executive
In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we get to know Alex Miljanić, a Senior Sales Development Representative (SDR) who works out of Chronosphere’s New York office. In her role as an SDR, Alex is the first line of contact for many of Chronosphere’s new customers. In this interview with Chris Ward, Alex indulges us with her day-to-day life as a Sales Rep in the observability space, why she joined Chronosphere, and she talks fondly about her brief stint as an English teacher abroad.
As a Senior Sales Development Representative (SDR) my day-to-day job includes sourcing, tiering new accounts, identifying champions and main point of contacts – I do a lot of the original engagements when we’re trying to break in and identify a good use case fit for our observability platform.
Yes, I’m the first line of contact for many of the relationships we have/will have with incoming customers. My team will tier out accounts, collect information on their tools and challenges, and plan a strategy for use case tie-ins so we can have introductory conversations and make sure our relationship would be mutually beneficial.
I came from a competitor. That was my first experience in sales. I really enjoyed observability and open source projects – and how those projects worked from the perspective of the engineers. I always wanted to stay in tech, but I found that my niche was in observability. Understanding how Chronosphere works, how scalable it is, how novel some of our control plane abilities are alongside the aggregation rights – ultimately, it was a decision about how advanced the technology is within the current day market, that’s what drew me in.
I worked in sales at another tech company and I wanted to stay within that space because I found that when you’re talking to engineers, observability is something always being prioritized or on the roadmap for future prioritizations – it’s a stabilizing front for teams understanding how their systems are behaving. If I’m talking to people in big banks, or talking to startups that are just getting their products off the ground – everybody is moving towards microservices, which are complex in nature and especially at scale. To handle microservices architectures, teams need to employ a seamless integration with reliable monitoring tools to track their metrics.
Observability sounds like a buzzword, but whenever I speak to engineers, it doesn’t matter if I’m talking to a VP of engineering or an SRE – when you say observability, describe Chronosphere with one or two sentences, it resonates with everybody. Whether or not it’s a current challenge that the company is facing is another story. But when you bring up the product, it’s something that everybody’s familiar with as being something of critical value
The scalability of microservices and resolving their associated pains. What I’m referring to can present itself in the form of outages and cardinality spikes in the same systems SRE and DevOps teams are actively managing. Chronosphere is particularly positioned in the market to handle these things.
We have the transparency and the visibility into your data which, now with these microservices becoming popularized and a de facto standard in the market – you’re noticing when you’re having these conversations with engineers, that they are all starting to see issues with the scale. They’re starting to understand that open source projects may not be able to handle the massive volume that they’re managing. So, they either have to hire a ton of engineers to build homegrown systems that can scale better – which costs a lot of money, or defer to SaaS vendors.
So, the answer to your question is scalability, through and through, which Martin talks about in his blogs and podcasts and Rob writes about in blogs as well.
At the moment, the team is working around strategically reframing not only what kinds of customers/teams we’re actively targeting, but also planning for the changing secondary and tertiary questions that they’re asking us given their wider experience in resolving the variable issues with their observability stack. OS technologies are fantastic – they’re amongst the most exciting pieces of the tech space for me. Engineers love them, and they love to adopt and configure them. The intersection point is creating a managed system that avoids vendor lock-in by being compatible with Graphite and Prometheus to maintain comfort/familiarity, but can successfully scale and store those metric stacks and reduce management overhead.
This is actually on my LinkedIn. I worked at a Czech University in Prague as an English teacher for a year with students that were ages 16 to 28. I was 23, but I think they all imagined me as being older just because I was making the decisions in the classroom. A lot of incredibly intelligent exchange students who all had an impressive level of grit leaving their families to live in a different country.
I’ll say what other people call me – a llama. I have a friend at Chronosphere that always calls me a llama. I’m a little goofy and I have a really long neck.
My Dad got a PhD in computer science from Rutgers University. That’s why both of my parents relocated from Serbia to America. Then war broke out over there and they ended up staying in America. I would say my Dad influenced me both from an academic and professional standpoint. He’s just incredibly hard working, so I’ve had those ideas instilled in me from a very young age. Growing up, becoming an adult – I’ve realized having parents who aren’t just solid parents but are also good people is a real gift. My dad always used to say that when you start speaking too loudly in a discussion, your content becomes less and less relevant. That’s a pretty important point in life; I think you should always be clear. If you operate with distracting behaviors, people will get distracted.
It’s kind of corny, but it’s one of Chronosphere’s pillars: “Win together, lose together.” When you’re a part of a cohort, everybody shares the same objective and the responsibility when things are going badly and when things are going well. You just have to stay aligned and share the emotional ups and downs that happen. I think in sales, they happen rather frequently.
Listen in to hear Alex and Chris’ entire conversation here:
In this Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we chat with Brandon Bright, located in Atlanta, Georgia and who started 2 years ago as the first member of the Chronosphere sales team. Brandon runs us through his day-to-day life as an Account Executive and also shares what inspired him to join the team, how he educates customers about outgrowing open source, why the technical sale is his jam, and the excitement of being a new Dad.
I partner with potential customers on observability and strategy – as well as which customers would be good for Chronosphere and vice versa. I support them through pilot and production. I also spend a lot of time supporting onboarding for new sales team members.
I would categorize the reasons why I joined in four different buckets. The first bucket is the founders. I spent ten-plus hours with (co-founder and CEO) Martin Mao, which was very rare in the interview process. With Martin, I spent time understanding the company vision and talking about what the sales team would look like; the technology; and Uber and M3 (Prior to co-founding Chronosphere, Martin led the observability team at Uber where he and Chronosphere co-founder and CTO, Rob Skillington, created the Prometheus-compatible open source metrics engine, M3).
Martin spent a ton of time with me – I think he was partially evaluating me and also how I would strategically think about the organization. That was huge for me – just knowing that I’m going to a company where the founders are specifically motivated to find and build the right sales team. (Read the backstory about how Chronosphere came to be.)
The second bucket was the tech. It was obvious that there was a technical advantage with the M3 and Uber story. I didn’t come from (an observability) background, so I had to do a lot of research on it. But from what I found, and from speaking to Martin, Rob, and other people, there’s definitely an advantage to having leaders with their track record in observability.
The third thing that I always look for in a job is the type of customer that we sell to. I’m big on selling to technical customers. I like the highly technical sale and large-scale problems, so those are things that motivated me to join Chronosphere.
The fourth bucket was just the market in general – evaluating how much companies spend on observability. Also the fact it’s a business-critical tool and it’s something that everybody needs. So, I think those are the four reasons that made me want to join Chronosphere. (Chronosphere head of sales, Ron DeCanio, talks more about the observability market opportunity here.)
I went to school for Engineering but my first job out of college was tech sales at (semiconductor vendor) Texas Instruments. Two other people and I decided to leave TI and start our own business. We built two mobile applications and a web application for really large events. The goal was to use mesh networks to allow people to connect without service. It gave me the groundwork to do a lot of research on tech and that was helpful in understanding software.
Providing observability to large scale cloud-native companies is a huge challenge. A lot of the companies that we speak to, especially the big tech companies, only have two options: build it yourself with open source, or use Chronosphere. The other tools that we’ve seen in the market just don’t provide the reliability or availability on top of being cost efficient. After doing a TCO (total cost of ownership) exercise, these organizations see Chronosphere as the only SaaS offering that’s anywhere close to providing the value they need versus the investment being made. That speaks to the differentiators of M3, and the differentiation that [Chronosphere] has built on top of it in our SaaS offering.
There is a lot to learn about:
We try to help explain all the potential challenges that exist with using open source for your new observability requirements.
More of a personal response, but my wife and I have been preparing for our first baby girl. A lot of my mental capacity has been preparing for that.
At work, I am building a training enablement program. With the recent funding and growth on the sales team, we’re hiring a ton of AEs (account executives), SDRs (sales development reps), SEs (sales engineers), and other sales team members. There’s a lot of work that goes into making sure new sales hires are prepared to be successful.
I have never actually read a full book. I’ve tried multiple times. Didn’t do it in college. Didn’t do it in high school. Always found my way around it. Still don’t do it today. I’m usually listening to podcasts or I’ll read an article, but a full book – I just don’t have the capacity to do that.
I would be a bird. I have this recurring dream at least once a week where I can fly. I don’t know if I was a bird in a past life – I don’t have a specific one in mind, but that would have to be it.
My Dad. He’s in sales as well. He was always around and made time for the family. He has a massive personality and always showed love for family and friends. Definitely the person that I strive to be.
I heard one recently from Eliza – a new team member on the recruiting team who said this in the interview process: “I chose this career because it gives me energy – rather than a career that takes energy away.” I’ve reflected on this a lot in my job, and while recruiting other people: figuring out what gives people energy, and what makes them excited.
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff
In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we get to know Nate Broyles, one of Chronosphere’s software engineers on the control team and a member of our growing East Coast offices in New York (also our largest location!) In this interview with Chris Ward, Nate delights us with a discussion about his love for sloths and weekend roller-skating, the most interesting technical challenges that Chronosphere is solving today, and what led to him joining Chronosphere over a year ago.
I am a software engineer, part of the technical staff on the control team. We are one of the teams responsible for the ownership of M3 – the core database that powers a lot of what we do here. We specifically focus on ensuring that we have the ability to control users’ access to data and resources. We are able to throw them in without causing any issues for the underlying data source itself. We also educate them on ways to better execute queries or writes so that they get on the golden path.
I had the opportunity to work with Matt Mihic [Chronosphere Head of Engineering] before. I really enjoyed working with him and got to trust his engineering acumen. Having been places before where metrics observability was a huge problem and we had to go through a few different vendors, I knew that what Chronosphere was attempting to solve was a big problem for people and it had a real opportunity. Then, I got to learn the backstory about how Chronoshere came to be. I had the opportunity to meet the co-founders Martin (CEO) and Rob (CTO) and I knew this is what I wanted to do. I didn’t plan on joining a Series B startup, but having all of those factors outlined in front of me made me feel much more comfortable knowing this is a place that is solving a real problem and has the right people in place (Read Martin Mao’s blog about Chronosphere’s recent $200 Series C funding round and how the has achieved unicorn status here.)
I was at Square before. I was there for about 6 ½ years. I learned a ton there – I think it was probably one of the most rewarding jobs I had because it really helped me mature and become a much better engineer. I met some super talented folks, some of whom I am really fortunate enough to work with today. I’m really grateful for that. Matt was my old boss – we were working on CashApp, which is a part of Square.
I think it’s just the sheer magnitude of data that is coming into the system. Our whole value proposition is, “You can send a ton of data to us, no problem.” We’ll store it and we’ll serve you back, use nice graphs – whatever you want, In whatever kind of timescale you want, in a response time that you’ll find acceptable. That’s very easy to state, but very difficult to actually do. There’s a lot of work that has to go on behind the scenes from the data store itself, being able to just simply handle that volume and that amount of data, all the way up to the front end – being able to properly present that much data. It affects every aspect of what we do here at Chronosphere. The biggest technical challenge is simply what we’ve set out to actually solve – which is handling the sheer amount of volume that our customers send to us.
What I’m currently focusing on right now is getting an integration test framework in place that can spin up the components of M3 and have them be able to talk to each other. We have unit tests in place and what we call “scenario tests” for long running operations, like adding a namespace. But, we don’t really have good integration tests that allow us to do inter-component communications. Like having an aggregator, a DB node, a coordinator spun up – and having them all talk to each other.
We actually have two iterations of this, but they require Docker containers to be spun up. And then those Docker containers talk to each other – and that’s fine, that works for correctness. But, it really is difficult when you’re trying to iterate and make changes very quickly. You have to rebuild your image and spin up a new Docker container. And then it makes debuggability difficult because you have to attach a remote debugger to a Docker container and that has to be built in a specific way to allow that. But it would be convenient if you could just go to your IDE and you just click run the same way you run a unit test and say: “Hey, I want a new DB node. I want a new aggregator, a new coordinator.” And they all come up and know how to talk to each other – and you can start issuing commands via the public API. That’s what I’m working on tackling right now. And this is really born out of the frustration that several engineers on the M3 team had as we were building out these previous features. I know when people talk about tests, eyes kind of glaze over, but I’m actually really excited about this.
I love roller skating. I grew up next to a skating rink – so I’m actually decent. Fairly often I’ll go to the park and roller skate. I really enjoy it, and it’s having a revival right now. It feels a bit like a vindication because for a long time people thought it was like a dinosaur. But we’re back, so it feels good to be on trend again.
I’ve known this answer for a while. The three-toed sloth is one of my favorite animals. It’s just super lazy, and comes down once a week to do its business. Otherwise, it’s just hanging out in the trees and has this little goofy smile on its face all the time. And that’s just the kind of energy that I want to project: taking it easy, having a good time. I’m trying to mosey my way through life. That would be me.
My parents. I think the world of them and they really provided a good example of work ethic and moral compass. And just how to try and be the best person you can be. I think my parents really gave me a solid footing. The older I get, the more I realize that not everyone gets that – and I just become more and more appreciative. I’m really, really grateful for what they’ve done and just being there for me and actually giving me the love I think anyone needs as they grow up from a child to an adult.
Professionally, I’ve just been fortunate to have people in the right place at the right time. I never had a mentor in the traditional sense where it’s the person that I check in with every so often, but I’ve been fortunate enough to meet people…and bounce ideas off of each other and it ends up helping me in the right direction. I don’t think I’ve taken the most direct path to where I am today. So there’s definitely been some missteps. But I do think that generally along the way, I’ve been able to gather really, really good advice that ultimately helped me get into a position that I’m pretty happy with.
I actually don’t know where it came from, but it’s something that I started saying maybe five or six years ago and now some of my friends know that I say it. It’s never too late to be the person that you want to be. I try to use that to try new things or be a better person the next day, if I feel like I wasn’t great today. I like the idea behind it, where, no matter how old you are, or where you are in life, you can always use the next day to try and do better than the last. I kind of appreciate that.
Listen in to hear Chris and Nate’s entire conversation:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff
What do you get when you cross a former science teacher with an eternally happy person who loves a hard technical challenge? Meet Audrey. In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we get to know Audrey Bastian, a UX designer who is helping Chronosphere give our customers – huge and not-as-huge alike – an excellent observability-team experience. Audrey has been with Chronosphere since March this year. In her interview below with Chris Ward, she talks about why she joined Chronosphere, exciting things she’s working on, what it’s like to be 5’3” and win an all-city fitness challenge, and more.
I’m a UX designer – one of two currently, but our team is growing rapidly. That means I’m designing the product to make it as usable as possible for everyone, whether you are a team member, a manager, or an executive.
My past experience was mostly working on stuff that wasn’t as technically challenging. When I was looking for my next role, I was looking for something that was super technical and kind of hard. Stuff that’s challenging just makes the day go faster, and I’m constantly – like every day – learning something new here, and it’s really fun to make those connections. I get so much pride and joy when I realize, “This connects to this” and I’m able to piece it all together. That’s a lot of fun. And then also my sister works here! Elenore is the engineering manager, and I feel like we’ve both been in tech for so long, and always thought it would be cool if we worked at the same company. So this has been a really great opportunity and a lot of fun for us … the Chrono-sisters, that’s what we call ourselves. {We recently did a Meet the Team profile on Audrey’s sister, Elenore Bastian, which you can read here.}
I’ve had a couple of different positions. The one most recently was working in media. I was designing how someone might program different TV shows to go on the air. It was cool. I worked in healthcare for a little bit, designing different products for health applications. I also worked at Microsoft. Prior to all of that, I taught eighth grade science on the South Side of Chicago. I made a big career switch.
The most interesting technical challenge I face is: How do you scale a product to fit so many different companies? We have customers that are massive, and have thousands of employees, and some that are much smaller. How do you create a product that’s intuitive for all of these different users? And make sure everyone understands all the things that the product does? And make sure they are all able to turn on the features that they need, or ignore the features that they don’t? How do we make a product that works for all groups? That’s definitely been a big challenge.
I’m part of the new Info Model team. It’s very small right now – there are just a couple of us. The Info Model team is essentially restructuring the product to better match users’ environments. Our users tend to think of themselves as teams, so how do we make our product more team-friendly? When you log into the product, how do you only see the things that are pertinent to you? That’s the new challenge I’m tackling. It’s very much like architecture, where you’re figuring out where everything fits in and how permissions work. We’re still very much in the early stages, and narrowing down exactly how we want it to look and feel, and what pieces need to be included.
Before the Info Model team, I was on the Foundations team and was working on a project that leads into this – users and teams, which is how users access the system, how do you set up a team, and now we’re getting into, what the team sees once it’s set up.
I think I’m oddly strong for how small I am. I’m not very tall, but I recently won an all-city fitness competition, which I’m very proud of. Another fun fact is I’ve gotten to wear the Clippy suit. It’s in the Microsoft archives and I got to wear it once.
I actually don’t have any. I used to when I was a teacher. I was obsessed with stickers, and I had them all over my water bottle. One time my student dropped my water bottle and it bent in a way that I couldn’t use it anymore. I was devastated because I had taken so much time to collect and stick each one in a nice way. So now I can’t do it again. I get too attached, so no more stickers.
This seems so basic, but I feel like I’d be a dog. I’m easily excited about stuff. I’m pretty much always in a good mood and pretty happy. I like being around people, which I think is true for most dogs. So maybe a dog, or a puppy – something that likes to play.
Definitely my parents. From an early age, they taught my sister and me about perseverance and how to be confident and work hard and grit. They also exposed us to so many opportunities at a young age that I’m really appreciative of. More recently, I also think of my sister as a role model. It’s been so interesting working with her, and seeing this new perspective where she’s not just my younger sister anymore. She has a career and is respected by her peers, and it’s fun to see her really own her job and do so well.
It’s one that my mom said ever since my sister (Elenore) and I were so young and it’s from Eleanor Roosevelt: “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” As a young kid, it definitely was true. Like when you aren’t wearing the coolest clothes, or you just don’t feel as cool – as long as I’m confident in myself, nothing else matters. And now, as I’ve grown older, it’s also true. I did this big career change, and so sometimes I don’t necessarily feel like I’m the best UX designer, or that I know the most. But as long as I’m confident in myself, and as long as I put in my best effort, I can always do the best job.
Listen in to hear Audrey’s and Chris’ full conversation:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Nate Broyles, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff
In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we pivot to the hardworking front-end team. Ting Chen is a UI engineer who joined Chronosphere’s New York crew (also our largest) less than five months ago. As a developer who has been on-call, Ting brings first-hand experience to his work on new distributed tracing capabilities Chronosphere just added to our observability platform. After reading (or listening to) the interview below, you’ll find out how a UI engineer like Ting is a product of many interesting parts – whether it’s enjoying a technical challenge in his work, being a foodie, admiring the beauty of art, or drawing from the inspiration his family has provided.
I’m a UI engineer on the platform team. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a range of features for our web app such as building a standalone site for our documentation, a dashboard to manage the user permissions, and also visualization for our new tracing feature.
For quite some time, I’ve wanted to work at a startup company. However, I’ve also been pretty picky with the startups that I want to join since I’ve seen a lot of them struggle for years before finally simmering out. I got excited with Chronosphere because it popped into my radar from two separate instances; first at work while I was at DoorDash – our teams suddenly got shifted to prioritize integrating Chronosphere – then from a friend who decided after many years to leave Square to join Chronosphere. After speaking to my friend, he told me all about the team and the mission. I found out that Chronosphere was only a series B company and got the business of a client as big as DoorDash; I felt like they were doing something right. The more I learned about Chronosphere’s team, the more I wanted to join. It was a small company where I could make a large impact, but it was also a team that was composed of brilliant senior developers from top companies like Uber, Square, and Pivotal. When I joined, it became clear to me that these engineers laid the foundation for a great company, bringing all the best coding practices and processes together in order to make an awesome observability product.
I was building food delivery apps at Caviar and then after we got acquired, at DoorDash.
I think the most interesting/fun technical challenge is in data visualization. Not only is it a pretty new space for me, but I think it’s interesting to take all the data we have and present it in a way that’s easily understandable to our end users. That’s part of the UI challenge – to take complex data and simplify it. In addition, there are some cool scaling and data ingestion challenges on the backend side that we also need to handle on the frontend. I’m not working on that personally, but there’s just so much complexity over there. Honestly, it’s hard to get my head wrapped around. While building our dashboards, we need to think about how we present all the data we have in a performant way, without oversimplifying our data to a point where it’s not really useful to people anymore.
I’m excited about the tracing project that we’re building. Having been on-call in the past, it’s important to be able to triage the issue as quickly as possible, and I think tracing is one of those features that will really help with that. And as I mentioned earlier, this has some cool visualization challenges; based on the data we’ve collected, how can we present the data in a way that would allow an engineer to quickly identify the issue from a glance? We’re looking at different solutions, such as D3, Visx, and Apache ECharts libraries, for providing the visualization – whether that’s a directed graph or a sankey diagram – that would, just by opening the page, allow the engineer to immediately identify the problem.
Maybe it’s not too far-fetched since I am a UI engineer, but up till I was headed to college, my main passion was drawing and painting and I wanted to be an artist. I had even gotten into art school and planned on doing a dual degree in engineering and art, but quickly realized there was no way to do both without sacrificing all my sleep. I chose to do engineering instead.
I don’t like putting stickers on my laptop. I consider myself to be a minimalist and I think there’s beauty to the construction of the laptop that would be ruined by slapping on a sticker. Similar to bumper stickers on cars, it sends all kinds of confusing messages, especially when the purchased product was meant to be sleek and simple.
I’d probably be a panda. They seem like super chill animals that love to eat. I can resonate with that.
Throughout my life, I’ve considered different people role models. I’m fortunate to have two older brothers I could observe to determine what to do and what behaviors to avoid (at school and around my parents). Later on in my career, taking that same mentality, I sought mentors who could also share with me their successes and failures so that I could learn from them.
As for celebrity role models, Hayao Miyazaki has always been an inspiration to me for his attention to detail to the subtleties of often overlooked beauty in art.
Finally, I’ve always considered my parents my longest running role models. They sacrificed a ton to immigrate to the US and they’re both blue collar workers that have had multiple jobs to give us a good life in the states. I’m motivated to work hard to give them an easier life as they have done for me.
A quote that motivates me is, “You don’t have to be great to get started, but you have to get started to be great.” This probably falls in the same vein of, “A large task can be very daunting until you break it down into smaller pieces.” Data visualization is something that I’m not an expert at, but I’m confident that as long as I get started and learn something new everyday, I’m going to become pretty proficient at a cool new skill.
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Stay tuned for more profiles on Chronospherians and check out our open roles here.
Listen in to hear Ting’s and Chris Ward’s full conversation:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Nate Broyles, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
In today’s Meet the Chronosphere Team profile, we hand the microphone to Elenore who manages the Platform team … and who unflinchingly responded with “people” and “learning opportunity” when asked why she joined Chronosphere. Culture-building is a key component of Chronosphere’s values and we’re thrilled to have a people-person like Elenore on our engineering team. During her 10 months at Chronosphere, Elenore has gotten ramped up on the world of monitoring, observability, and metrics! Elenore joins our interview from her location on the West Coast and shares fun insights about life at Chronosphere.
I’m the manager for the Platform team, and the Platform team is everything to do with how users interact with the product. It’s the UI (user interface) – the front end – as well as behind the scenes stuff like the API and the CLI and all the components we integrate with.
The people, one hundred percent. I could tell the team was committed to ramping everybody up, to investing in each other – I’m brand new to monitors, observability, metrics, and that whole world and Chronosphere felt like a safe space to learn.
I was at a company called Pivotal for a long time, and Pivotal got acquired by VMware. So I was at VMware for a little bit and I just wasn’t into it – so I hopped over to Chronosphere.
I think a big challenge we’re facing right now – which isn’t super technical but it’s something I think about a lot – is thinking about our product as a whole across all the touch points. How do we present Chronosphere’s ✨vibe✨ to our customers? How are they interacting with the UI and the CLI, and how do we make those interactions seamless and consistent?
I’ve just collected a bunch of peer feedback for all of my reports and I’m really excited to write that up and share it out – it was all really positive and I’m really excited to start building feedback as a habit and not as a chore. I’m hoping to show peer feedback is beneficial, productive, easy – not scary, or an overhead of process. I want the engineers to be giving feedback to each other all the time, but one thing that makes that really hard is being remote, and the pandemic, and not all knowing each other, and not all being in the office. It just comes less naturally, so I’m trying to think of better ways for us to have those organic conversations.
Sometimes it’s hard to hear feedback, so I wanted people to come up with ideas or growth goals for themselves. Like, “I want to be a better leader on my team by making sure I share the right amount of context and information.” I’m asking very pointed questions around specific goals, and that’s been helpful in that people are picking out what they want feedback on – essentially taking ownership over their growth.
When I was 18 and a senior in high school, I won a pageant. It had all the pageant things like a big dress and a tiara. It’s a very small town thing.
I have a Pacific Northwest Native American totem pole. And I have a sticker of my cat, Owen.
I would be an alien. Or Sasquatch. I love conspiracy theories, so I would pick something like that.
My parents. Both my parents are in positions of leadership – they’re both judges. For my mom, as a female judge, I think you just get more flack, more scrutiny, than your male counterparts – like you can get as a woman in tech. You can bottle up some of that frustration and anger and have that control your life. But you can also just let it go. I’ve been learning how to do that over the years. My dad’s also a judge, and he is very thoughtful. Being thoughtful and empathetic is helpful as a manager, and in software in general!
At work, every problem is a communication problem – pretty much always. So if people are having problems, I ask, “How can we communicate better? Where are the gaps in communication?”
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Stay tuned for more profiles on Chronospherians and check out our open roles here. You can listen in on Elenore’s and Chris Ward’s full conversation by watching the video below:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Team: Alec Holmes, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Nate Broyles, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff
The Chronosphere team is growing so fast, and in so many locations, it’s challenging to shine the spotlight fast enough – but we’re going to keep going because we love to share our stories. In today’s “Meet the Chronosphere Team” profile, you’ll get to know Alec Holmes, a critical member of our growing West Coast Team. Alec joined the team almost a year ago, and in this piece, he tells us about his career in software development, what drew him to Chronosphere, and what inspires him.
I work in engineering, and because of the nature of startups, I tend to jump around a little bit. My primary focus, however, is centered around the part of our product that is helping customers track the health of their various systems. Lately this involves refining how customers manage their alerting configuration and how they build out various systems to support that. This ends up touching on a couple of different areas of the product. Some of my time is spent just sitting at my keyboard and coding, but I also spend a fair amount of time collaborating with others on ideas and architecture.
There are quite a few lists of reasons, so I’ll narrow it down a little bit. One of the really big ones for me is the team of people that I’m working with. I’ve always found that I’m happiest when I’m working in a team of people that are all very collaborative and supportive and working in sync. That’s something that I’ve found at Chronosphere. And what drew me in is – I knew a couple of people to start with, and then as I went through the interview process and met various people in various roles, I really liked the people I met and I had a really good feeling. I just want to work with really great people who will help me learn. Beyond the team is what we’re building here. It is something I’ve always been interested in and felt is pretty important. In past roles, I’ve worked in areas that have used observability platforms and I’ve never been quite satisfied. For me, when Chronosphere came along, it felt like the right time to join something early enough where you can really help shape what we’re doing. That was very compelling.
The last thing that I was working on prior to Chronosphere was at the FinTech company, Square. I was there for about eight-and-a half years. I was kind of lucky because it was such a long time, and the company grew a lot during that time, so I was able to touch on a couple of different parts of the business. I started off working on their payments infrastructure – working on the systems that process credit card payments and make sure that the small merchants they support get paid every day. I also worked on their public developer API platform. The last stretch there was working for the Cash App part of the business. I was helping build their cloud infrastructure. It turns out that last stint on the Cash App ended up leading to my work at Chronosphere. A lot of the platform work we were doing there, and a lot of the problems we were trying to deal with, are the ones that Chronosphere is solving.
We talk a lot about scaling metrics and scaling the metric storage engine. That’s an extremely interesting problem, but I actually don’t work that much on those types of problems at Chronosphere. The ones I’m really interested in solving right now are scalability in two aspects around what we internally call “triage”, which is helping customers understand, quickly, when something is going wrong in their systems and helping them mitigate it.
One problem, which isn’t immediately technical, is that the customers we tend to target are quite large and have sprawling organizational structures. When these companies are trying to define alerting configuration, it’s not one small group of people doing it. It’s hundreds or thousands of people across many different business lines. The first challenge that we’ve had to start facing is – when there’s all this information they need to model in the observability space, how can we represent it for them so they can navigate it very naturally and not be overwhelmed by the sheer number of things that they’re looking at? When we’re designing some of our newer observability systems, we’ve had to really think about what concepts will make this natural to scale from a small customer to a large customer. From a conceptual model, that’s been very interesting.
On a more technical side, this all comes with challenges on the backend as well. If you’re a customer and you have thousands, or tens of thousands, of constantly executing alerts, we want to ensure those are running smoothly, they execute on time, and the data that’s coming back is correct and usable. Part of the challenge of building out the backend for easily navigable alert structures is that you want it to be fast and reliable and snappy, and that technically can be quite challenging to build.
What I’m mainly working on right now is rolling out a pretty significant revamp of how we let customers manage their alerting. We’re moving towards a model that’s more flexible and allows a lot more reusability around the parameters people define. One of the first things that I started on when I joined here was actually working with the head of product and head of design to step back and think about what are the important concepts we need to think about. We gradually worked from there to build out a model, and then from there to build out a pretty huge change to the backend to support this. It’s been months in the making and we are just starting to roll it out now. There’s excitement in seeing something you’ve been working on finally come to fruition, and seeing it in the hands of the customers actually using it.
One fun fact is I spent most of my childhood growing up in the suburbs outside of New York City, which is probably something anyone could guess. But the fun fact aspect of it is, for five years, when I was a teenager, I lived with my family in Tokyo, which was pretty amazing. I was very lucky as a kid to be able to run around this huge city with free rein. I was definitely very disappointed to move back and then not have a drivers licence and be stuck in the woods.
I am admittedly not much of a sticker person, so I don’t have any stickers on my laptops. I do have one single fridge magnet, which is an Eskimo holding a snow cone that I got in Iceland, but nothing on my laptop. I think if I were pressed, and had to put a sticker on, there’s a coffee shop around here I really like, called Andytown. I do notice when I buy my coffee at the register, they have a lot of very adorable stickers of birds holding coffee cups and things like that. I think that would probably be the first sticker to come.
This is probably the opposite of the fun fact question in that everyone would guess it, at least people who know me and work with me: I would be a cat. For those who know me, I am a cat enthusiast. But beyond that, I think they have a good life. They spend half the time exploring and just kind of roaming around and learning new things, seeing new things. And the other half they’re just lounging and enjoying life.
I’m one of those people that has the mentality of “it takes a village,” so there might not be one singular person, but there’s certainly a lot of people over time. To give a few examples, when I was a kid in middle school, I was very lucky in that I had a teacher there who ran the computer lab, who basically saw that I liked computer things. And was not only very encouraging, but gave me books on programming and showed me the ropes a little bit. That was probably the first example of someone who really recognized what I liked and helped me learn how to explore that.
When it comes to my career now, and where I’ve been going the past few years, it was during my time at Square that I was really able to mature a lot as an engineer. And I credit that with that company – just having a lot of very bright, very thoughtful people. When I was there, I had a bunch of leads that were very thoughtful about helping me plan my career path and giving me really good feedback – that went a really long way. Beyond that, I’ve also throughout my career become friends with a lot of peers I’ve worked with. What that’s ended up being for me is having not only friends, but a social support network where we all act as sounding boards to sometimes talk about very deep-in-the-weeds, technical things, and sometimes talk about the long arc of where we want to go as software engineers.
There is one quote I’ve always really enjoyed. It’s from James Baldwin, and the quote is, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” I like the quote because I think life in general is full of challenges at various levels – some are personal, some are community, and some are global. I think it’s a good reminder that even when problems are huge, and sometimes feel almost insurmountable, that you can never make any progress until you just take that first step. It’s a quote I like that passes through my mind from time to time.
It’s always fun to hear someone in their own words. Listen in to hear the full conversation:
Meet the Chronosphere team: Mary Fesenko, software engineer
Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Elenore Bastian, Engineering Manager
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Nate Broyles, Member of Technical Staff
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Audrey Bastian, UX Designer
Meet the Chronosphere Team: Ting Chen, Member of Technical Staff