Percona appoints Kris Buytaert to lead observability

Percona has appointed Kris Buytaert as Observability Practise Lead, expanding its work in observability.

He will build and deliver observability solutions for Percona customers, focusing on environments where performance issues extend beyond the database itself.

The appointment comes as companies manage increasingly distributed databases and application estates, making it harder to identify the source of operational problems across software, infrastructure and data systems.

In the role, Buytaert will also help shape Percona's product and partner strategy as it broadens its observability offering.

He joins from Belgian technology consultancy Inuits, where he was Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer. He is also known in the open source and infrastructure community as a Co-Founder of devopsdays, the conference series launched in 2009, and as an organiser of CfgMgmtCamp.

The move builds on Percona's partnership with Coroot to bring full-stack observability to open source database environments. Coroot Percona Edition adds visibility into applications, networks and infrastructure alongside Percona Monitoring and Management, its existing monitoring product.

Percona recently also announced the general availability of PMM High Availability, adding to its database monitoring portfolio.

Broader scope

Observability has become a bigger focus for infrastructure and database suppliers as customers try to trace faults across multiple layers of the technology stack rather than within individual systems. For database specialists, that means addressing incidents where the database appears to be the source of a problem, but the underlying cause lies elsewhere.

"When something goes wrong, the database often gets the blame, even when the real issue is somewhere else," said Kris Buytaert, Observability Practise Lead at Percona. "Percona has deep expertise across the data layer. I want to build on that and help customers see across their entire stack, so they can get to the root cause faster. My goal in this role is to give organizations practical, open source-driven observability services and solutions they can trust, no matter the tools they choose to run."

Percona provides open source database software, support and services across technologies including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Valkey and Redis.

Open source focus

Percona's observability strategy appears tied to its broader positioning in open source infrastructure, where customers often use a mix of tools and seek to avoid dependence on a single vendor.

Bennie Grant, Chief Operating Officer at Percona, said the company sees an opportunity to expand its offering beyond databases alone.

"We believe we can provide significantly more value to our customers by expanding our observability offerings beyond the database," said Bennie Grant, Chief Operating Officer at Percona. "Kris has helped shape how the DevOps community thinks about monitoring and observability, and he brings real-world experience from years of working alongside the teams who run infrastructure. He'll help us build solutions grounded in the same open source values our customers count on us for."

Buytaert has long been associated with Linux, open source operations and infrastructure automation. He also serves as an ambassador for the Continuous Delivery Foundation.

The appointment gives Percona a senior figure with a profile in the DevOps community as it seeks to connect database monitoring more closely with broader operational tooling and services.

Based in Belgium, Buytaert most recently served as Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Inuits.