Unearthing Observability with New Relic

**Buddy Brewer** (0:00)
80% of executives plan to increase their budget for observability in the next year. 20% expect to increase it significantly.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:07)
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**Dan Lines** (0:27)
Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Dan Lines, and today we are joined by New Relic Global VP Buddy Brewer and SVP Greg Perotto to talk about what's happening at New Relic and their new state of observability report.
Guys, thanks for joining us today.

**Buddy Brewer** (0:46)
Thanks, Dan. Great to be here.

**Dan Lines** (0:48)
Awesome to have you on.
Now, to kick us off, Buddy, we're gonna start with you. Could you take a couple of minutes to walk us through your career journey as an engineering leader? How did you become the CTO at such a great company?

**Buddy Brewer** (1:04)
Yeah, for sure. I started my career as a software engineer. I knew I wanted to do two things when I got out of school. I wanted to write software and I wanted to work at a startup. This is 20 years ago. I happened to, this was in the Triangle area in North Carolina around Raleigh Durham, Chapel Hill. The job that was available was in the monitoring business. And I've been doing that for the last 20 years.
So it's been a lot of fun. In that time, I've worn a lot of different hats. I went from engineering, I was an engineering manager for a while, crossed over into product management, started a company in the monitoring space, sold it, worked in sales for a little while, trying to drive adoption of my company post-acquisition, lead product at that company, joined New Relic. I was a general manager running our engineering and product teams for a chunk of New Relic's business.
Spent a lot of time talking with a lot of our strategic customers, which is one of the great things about being at New Relic. We've got a large install base with a lot of customers doing a lot of really interesting things in software.
And lately I've been running our product partnership practice actually trying to connect our observability tools to all of the other tools that engineers use every day to get their work done.

**Dan Lines** (2:11)
That's awesome. I mean, it sounds like a pretty diverse background, not only just engineering, but some product related stuff. And you've been an entrepreneur. We're going to dive into that all a little bit later here, but it seems like that diverse background has been a key for you.

**Buddy Brewer** (2:27)
It has, it has. I've always been interested in how things work.
And I almost draw a parallel between full stack engineering and wanting to understand how all of the pieces fit together from the front end through the infrastructure and everything else in order to deliver a user experience. In the same way I've always been fascinated by all of the pieces that have to come together and all of the teams and systems and people and everything in order to create a successful business. And so as a consequence, I've found myself in a lot of different parts of the way businesses work over the years. Perfect.

**Dan Lines** (2:56)
Thanks for sharing that insight. And now Greg, I know you've been a leader not only at New Relic, but some really amazing companies as well. Hootsuite, DocuSign. What do you find unique about New Relic's culture and what led you over there?

**Greg Perotto** (3:14)
New Relic's culture is frankly a standout for me. I've been fortunate to be in some really great cultures and New Relic tops the list. For me, we are very focused on our customers and their success. So you look at engineers and developers and providing them with tools to be able to do their jobs better, faster, easier, more efficiently.
And for many companies, you see them slap something on the wall that says we're customer first or customer focused.
And that's all it really is, just something that's been slapped on the wall. At New Relic, it truly is a mantra for everyone in the business and everything we do. And so that to me is sort of the North Star for us. And then I look at things like our values of being bold, passionate, accountable, connected and authentic. And we're really encouraged to lean into all of those, to really bring our authentic best selves to work, to be connected to one another, to be connected to our customers and our partners, and to be bold and passionate around the things that we do in our business. And it's, again, it's not just words on a wall, it's actually walking the talk in everything that we do. And it's pretty amazing.