The rapid migration of microservices and containerized workloads to the cloud demands an ability to have a full view of how the pieces work together at any given point in the process.

The solution is observability, an area in which Splunk Inc.’s Spiros Xanthos (pictured) is very familiar. Xanthos, who quite appropriately wears a T-shirt with the words “Observe ability” printed on the front, has been a key figure in the field of distributed tracing, an ability to monitor across microservices applications.

“We are big believers in full fidelity, being able to connect bytes of data in ways that make sense economically for the customer,” said Xanthos, vice president of product management, observability and ITOps. “By having a way to connect all of the data — metrics, traces, logs, events, incidents — we can build a more effective tool on top to provide answers back to the user with high confidence. It is the future and we’re just starting.”

Xanthos spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. They discussed the future role of the OpenTelemetry project and the importance of end-to-end visibility across applications. (* Disclosure below.)

Support for open-source infrastructure

Before joining Splunk, Xanthos was the CEO and founder of Omnition Inc., a startup that specialized in distributed tracing. Omnition was acquired by Splunk in 2019, and Xanthos now leads the Splunk’s observability practice while continuing to support OpenTelemetry, a key Cloud Native Computing Foundation open-source project formed after the merger of OpenCensus and OpenTracing.

“My personal belief is there’s no future where infrastructure is anything but open source,” Xanthos said. “OpenTelemetry is now pretty much de facto; every vendor supports it. It is the future because it frees up the data and breaks up the silos.”

During the .conf event this month, Splunk expanded the scope of its observability offerings to include a preview of an AlwaysOn Profiling feature for its application performance management platform.

“End to end is important,” Xanthos said. “You hit all of the pieces from deployment all the way to production. Bringing everything together and applying analytics on top is the way to have this step function improvement in how your monitoring solution works so that it can keep up with the complexity of the underlying infrastructure.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of during the Splunk .conf21 Virtual event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Splunk’s .conf21 Virtual conference. Neither Splunk Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE