Open Source Summit NA 2025 | Alok Bhide & Bill Hineline, Chronosphere

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Alok Bhide

Head of Product Innovation

Chronosphere

Bill Hineline

Field CTO

Chronosphere

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play_circle_outline Logs are essential for troubleshooting and provide insights into complex systems.

play_circle_outline Chronosphere: Optimizing Log Costs While Ensuring Essential Insights in the Evolving Observability Landscape

play_circle_outline Importance of aligning observability strategies with business goals for better ROI.

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Alok Bhide & Bill Hineline, Chronosphere

Alok Bhide

Head of Product Innovation Chronosphere

Bill Hineline

Field CTO Chronosphere

In this interview from Open Source Summit North America 2025, Alok Bhide and Bill Hineline of Chronosphere join theCUBE Research’s Paul Nashawaty to discuss the evolving role of logs in modern observability strategies. With the launch of their new logging capabilities, Chronosphere extends its platform to help users not only unify their telemetry data but also gain control over growing data volumes and associated costs.

Hineline and Bhide explain why logs remain essential in troubleshooting and system insight, acting as the connective tissue between ... Read more

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Alok Bhide & Bill Hineline, Chronosphere

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Paul Nashawaty

>> Hello and welcome back to Open Source Summit North America 2025. My name's Paul Nashawaty, I cover app dev space. Hey, covering all things open source. I am joined today by Alok and Bill. Hey guys, how are you doing?

Bill Hineline

>> Good. How are you?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Great, great. Great to have you here. Chronosphere is doing a lot of great things, a lot of interesting activity happening, and you're doing things right in my wheelhouse. We have the observability space is really starting to grow, really starting to kind of take off. I love the announcements that you are sharing and you're doing this announcement with logs. Let's talk a little bit about that.

Alok Bhide

>> Yeah. I'll go ahead.

Bill Hineline

>> Yeah, you want to take that?

Alok Bhide

>> Yeah. So what we've done in the last couple of months is release our second or logging 2.0 you could say. And that means that what we've, as Chronosphere is a product that is excellent at your controlling your data volumes and help giving you insight and data volumes. We hadn't done that for logs yet, so what we're launching is the ability to do that with logs now. Control data volumes, insights into your data volumes with logs.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Well, I mean, it sounds really exciting and I'll tell you why. When I look at my research, I cover day zero, day one, day two, and DevSecOps and my practice and my day two research really covers all around observability and what's happening in this space. And I found that the biggest use case for observability is management, like log management and understanding what's happening. And then there's things like APM, NPM, there's tracing, there's all sorts of things that people want to do, but when it comes to logs, there's a big factor here that organizations are trying to understand and really to take actionable insights against the information that they're running. So Bill, what was the strategic direction here for why logs? Why logs and why now?

Bill Hineline

>> Yeah. Well, I mean, logs are the glue for everything. I mean, you've mentioned traces, you mentioned metrics. You get alerts that happen that say, "Some things are going on in your environment." The metrics and traces will get you to where and sort of what's changed, but the logs are the glue that help you. And so without those, you spend a lot longer troubleshooting and digging, but they've got to be valuable. They've got to be the right logs. And so bringing them into the space and offering what we're offering now is the next step for getting folks much closer there.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, absolutely. And then I think that, it's funny, I would make this a comment saying that the number one use case for observability is the storage admin. They just store a bunch of things and not know what to do with this information, but having real data, and it's the lifeline of the business, so capturing the right information, the right logs, and what's been incredibly impressive to me about the Chronosphere platform is the unified approach. And when you're looking at it, the five big impacts of log data growth, we see cost inflation. We see that slower performance signal-to-noise, understanding what's happening. But look, maybe we could talk a little bit about that when you were rationalizing this and saying logs the direction we want to go and selling it to the company and saying, this is really what customers are looking for. Why did you go in this direction?

Alok Bhide

>> Well, so first and foremost, I think Bill highlighted this, logs aren't going away and they're never going to go away. There's been stories about how people will reduce their dependence on logs. So first and foremost, most companies still heavily depend on logs. So we had to and wanted to and needed to offer something that was compelling in the space of logging. Moreover, it's not just about offering a logging offering just another one because there's many others out there. The key thing was that many customers just generally struggle with the costs of logging. And so our goal was not just offer a logging solution, offer them those insights into how they can manage those costs, and that really brought it together. And so our platform is complete when we have logs also, but also control as part of our logs or controlling costs or controlling volumes as part of our logs.

Paul Nashawaty

>> I mean, that makes complete sense to me. I understand that from that perspective. I am just kind of curious, bill, why are other vendors that do logging, why are they not managing, doing more about it?

Bill Hineline

>> I think it's a sensitive topic. I think part of it is that the business model has been along with logs, but also traces and metrics collect everything. We've been in this environment of collect everything, and now it's about measuring value because as companies are scaling out as that volume is becoming massive and so cost is becoming a factor. And then the thing about cost is how do I value or how do I understand the value that Telemetry's giving me to make sure that I'm collecting the right things and the things I am collecting are actually tied back to value I'm getting out of the platform. And so as Alok mentioned, that's what we're doing with the logs piece. We already do that with traces and metrics, but it's about getting that value measurement out there and showing that that's an important component of it versus just collecting everything and then sort of figuring out how to deal with it later when the bill comes.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, 100%. I mean, this is something that we're hearing in our research. We're seeing that being proactive versus reactive is key. It's critical. You have to have that actionable insight. With all this said, there's a lot of observability companies out there. There's a lot of different ways to do observability, and when I look at it, organizations are either not mature at all or very mature. Chronosphere has some major differentiation. What is it? What is it? And Bill, let's start with you. What do you think about the major difference? I know what it is from the briefings, but I'd like to hear from you.

Bill Hineline

>> I think one of the biggest ones is what I just mentioned, which is really around giving that control back to the customer. Letting them understand what the value of the telemetry and the logs that they're putting into the platform is really returning for them. And tracing that back to the reason they're doing observability to begin with. If you're a larger organization, hopefully your observability strategy is tying back to your business strategy. If it's to improve your MPS score, if it's to improve revenue, you need metrics to help you drive to that. You got to get the right metrics and understanding all of that and the value that each of those metrics is bringing to your overall strategy is important. And so that's a big differentiator for us. We provide you with the ability to understand that value. I worked with developers for years. They tend to get FOMO, they want to collect everything and they've been burned. They have a lot of experience that tells them to do that. We give them and the central observability teams, for example, the data meta on your meta to say, "Okay, I know you wanted 5,000 metrics, you're using a hundred."

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right.

Bill Hineline

>> Right?

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, I mean that's important. I think it's absolutely important. I think the other thing, look, I think about it from this perspective. In our research we see that 75% of organizations that responded to our study said that they use between six and 15 different tools for observability six and 15 different tools and 2025 that 54% of those organizations indicated that they want to move to more of a unified view. So when I was asked about differentiation, that's one of the cool things I think about Chronosphere is you have logs, you have all the stuff that they're doing here, which is awesome. But talk a little bit about that unified approach. You can take those different platforms and tie it together.

Alok Bhide

>> Yeah, I mean, look, we see that as well when we see our customers. There's tons of customers who have many, many different tools for observability, at least three as you said, many, many more. And our core principle outside of cost control, which Bill mentioned is the ability to unify and unification is an action, but really what we're talking about is making developers more efficient when they're trying to troubleshoot an incident or something like that. So logs isn't now an integral part of that platform overall. In order to achieve that goal, which is developer efficiency, how do you make a developer most efficient? If they had 16 different tools and they could still remain efficient, I don't think this would've been a problem. But the fact that they're not efficient is what we also solve and is another big differentiator for us when customers have tons of different tools.

Paul Nashawaty

>> And you also work with your ecosystem too. So if there's a bespoke solution that some organizations are using, you meet the customer where they are in their journey, which is something else I found that was interesting. If they're using an OTel kind of solution and you're using that telemetry data as well, you can kind of incorporate that into your solution as well. Is that fair?

Alok Bhide

>> Absolutely. I mean, this goes to the core of who we are as a company. I guess a third differentiator in that in the way we're talking about this, we always see ourselves integrating with the rest of the open source community or proprietary vendors where it makes sense. So the fact that someone might be using an OTel collector sending us data, customers don't have to change what they do when they're sending us all this stuff. We will naturally integrate. We've built the product such that it naturally integrates with everything that's generally out there. It's also becoming a bit of an expectation on a vendor like us that I don't think we can really survive if we didn't. But that's something that we do and we do it pretty well across the board. I just mentioned OTel, but there's tons of other standards we support.

Bill Hineline

>> And I think going to those more open source standards is making it easier to get real results out of tools like Chronosphere, because if you're using an open source platform like OTel, your metrics, your traces are tied together much more cleanly, your blogs are much easier to correlate to all of the other great things you're seeing on that single platform that pulls it all together.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. At least from the perspective of using what the prospect that you're talking to is used to using. So they're using this certain tool stack or tech stack, they can figure out how to incorporate it into your solution. That's my next question, I guess. Bill, I'll ask you this question is, when I talked to organizations and there's a little bit of a struggle of saying we love to do observability, we really don't know how to get started. It's a hard thing. We do alerting now. We do some maybe a little bit of logging, but a little bit of monitoring, but we don't know how to incorporate this to make this more mature. What would you recommend to organizations?

Bill Hineline

>> I think you have to start with a strategy. And I think that without a strategy, you wind up going to picking a tool, you wind up thinking about it more from a component level, which some enterprise still do that. They start to think about, I have a product, I want to measure it. And they start with, here's a database, here's a cloud instance, here's this and here's that. Instead of thinking about the whole picture as a service and how a user might be impacted. But a strategy really gets you to think about what am I trying to solve, right? I mentioned revenue, conversion rates, MPS, all of the business sort of initiatives. How do you tie your observability into that? How do you tie then things like a methodology for what I'm going to collect, whether it be metrics, traces, or logs. How are you going to get buy-in within your organization for why we're doing this when everybody's got a million things on their plate already? So it really is to be short about it, a strategy, and we can talk for hours about that.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Oh, of course, of course. No, I like that. But I do want to ask the question because a lot of times the devils are in the details, and if you're looking from a product perspective, if somebody was to say, "Well, I have a strong technical bench, we can figure this out ourselves. We can do it all ourselves. We don't need to have a wrapper solution to do it." I personally think that's the wrong direction. What would you recommend somebody doing if they were saying, "Hey, we can do it ourselves."

Alok Bhide

>> So I've seen many of my customers have been in this space where they're trying to decide between self-hosting, home-growing or going with a vendor. I think it all comes down to where do they want to spend their time? I don't make a recommendation of go with us. I think that's a very wrong recommendation to make because it's a personal choice or not individual. The company has to make a choice for itself. If they're optimizing for low cost that no vendor could provide, I think the option is to go self-host, but there's always the opportunity cost. They have to always understand, and it's about making sure they understand the opportunity cost and highlighting what we've seen. We see several customers in our careers in this industry. We see even more customers rather than just working with one company, with one vendor. But what we've seen across many, many of these customer conversations is that opportunity cost and just always highlighting that opportunity cost that they're going to be making and helping them, giving them the information to make that choice in an informed fashion. I don't think I can ever really change somebody's mind if their heart is set on it. I think that's the most difficult thing a human being could do is change somebody's mind, but giving them the data to help them understand what their future might look like. Now, we've also therefore seen what we use as data points to give them that information is to tell them, look, what we've seen with vendors who have moved away from that separate tools or self-hosting option onto a product like Chronosphere for example, is because they got tired of managing things. So those data points help make that opportunity cost clear when they want to make that choice. However, I never push them in a direction.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Yeah, that makes sense. So let me ask you this then. A year from now when we're sitting here having the same conversation at OSS next year at this time, what do you see the future of logs and observability and where is it going?

Alok Bhide

>> I'll meet a couple of data points and then I'll hand it over to Bill.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Sure.

Alok Bhide

>> A couple of things that are happening, they will always continue to grow. I think that's one standard normal thing to expect, which is data volumes will continue to grow and they might grow exponentially. Hotels becoming a standard slowly but surely quickly depending on who you speak with, but it's not in a good way, is becoming a standard. And I would say the third thing, and I'll hand it over to Bill in a second, is there was this belief that logs would vanish that has not happened and it's not going to happen. And I think those are the realities that I live within, cost standardization through tooling and in hotel, and they're here to stay.

Paul Nashawaty

>> Makes sense. Bill, last word.

Bill Hineline

>> Well, plus one, everything he said, I'll say that. I think that when it comes to the DIY approach, I agree with Alok. We don't do push people there, but I think people, as we talk next year, I think we'll find more people are realizing that they'd rather spend money on innovation and observability becomes more of a utility that you just need to have in-house capabilities that is maybe not something you build and managed yourself.

Paul Nashawaty

>> That makes a lot of sense. Well, I want to thank both of you for joining me today. This has been really, really great. I love having you on the desk here. It's awesome talking about this. Chronosphere is always a huge, I'm a he fan. I think it's awesome. I love where you're going with the product. I want to thank the here for watching. I'm Paul Nashawaty, and I'm coming to you live from the show floor at Open Source Summit North America 2025. Thank you for watching theCUBE, the leading source of tech news.