Executive Interview With Albert Mavashev, CTO of Nastel

Nastel Technologies provides middleware-centric application performance monitoring for mission-critical applications from the datacenter to the cloud and is the only monitoring vendor with a unified platform to support all software and appliance-based middleware technology requirements. Nastel AutoPilot® provides enterprises with deep dive visibility into the root-cause of problems. Its real-time analytics reduces false-positives and delivers warnings about problems before users are impacted. Droid Report recently interviewed Albert Mavashev about his current role as CTO and discussed industry insights.

Droid Report: Hello Albert, could you tell us more about your current role as CTO of Nastel and your initiatives for 2014?

Albert Mavashev: My role is to oversee the Nastel technology portfolio, follow current and future trends and define Nastel product and technology strategy. Currently, our initiatives revolve around brining enterprise level monitoring into a quick to deploy SaaS offering consumable by large and small enterprises. These initiatives combine cloud, software as a service and mobile themes into a single product offering.

Droid Report: How do you see organizations evolving in the future with middleware-centric application performance monitoring?

Albert Mavashev: Middleware is the fabric that connects applications and it is important to make sure that this fabric is properly monitored. It is very similar to the human body's circulatory system -- side effects of such system failing or malfunctioning may cause cascading and catastrophic failures across a broad range of systems applications. Enterprises must learn to understand behavior of this fabric in order to avoid cascading problems and predict future performance trends. Many of application failures have precursors that can be observed in the middleware fabric. We see enterprises moving to a holistic monitoring model using predictive analytics that encompasses not only IT infrastructure but also application and its middleware fabric.

Droid Report: What are some challenges which you see companies today in the industry are faced with?

Albert Mavashev: You can reduce most of the challenges to cost, time and opportunity. Most of what we do will impact one or more of these in various degrees. Companies are constantly challenged with maintaining a balance in regards to these 3 axis. In my view organization are faced with mounting complexity on all fronts -- customer habits and mood, social media, government regulation, cloud and mobile, etc. We are trying to address part of the complexity when it comes to applications, middleware and delivery of missions critical business services. One way to deal with complexity is to reduce it -- invest in technologies, process and methodology that makes complex simple. This is easier said than done. Not dealing with growing complexity especially in the computing space can be disastrous. Another very serious challenges it dealing with change and more importantly with the rate of change. Organizations must be prepared to change quickly and often radically to accommodate new competitive realities. Change also means experimentation and failure -- meaning being ready to experiment and not afraid to fail.

Droid Report: Could you share some of your personal insight about the concept of Amplify Logging (a programming model for enriching data from existing logging frameworks with business context, elapsed time and location)?

Albert Mavashev: Amplifying logging feeds into the area of reducing complexity of highly complex systems and applications. Current logging paradigm while simple in itself is used in such a way that makes application diagnostics very time consuming and complex. This happens partly because of the unstructured nature of log entries used by application developers. The concept of "Amplify Logging" is aimed at creating a methodology and a concrete approach of how to turn simple logging constructs into a very power diagnostics tool for DevOps and developers. Again, the bottom line is to reduce cost, time when it comes to diagnosing application performance and behavior problems. As an application developer myself, I know inspecting logs and coming up with root cause could be quite a time consuming and expensive process. All software organization can relate to that.

We would like to thank Albert Mavashev, CTO and for taking the time for this discussion and Nastel.