Percona Names Kris Buytaert Observability Practice Lead

RALEIGH, N.C., Oct. 29, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Percona, a company providing open source database software, support, and services, today announced that Kris Buytaert has joined the company as Observability Practice Lead. Buytaert, a longtime Linux and open source consultant who is recognized as one of the instigators of the DevOps movement, will build and deliver observability solutions for Percona customers.

As database environments grow more distributed and complex, performance problems rarely stay within the database. Organizations increasingly need visibility across applications, infrastructure, and the data layer to find and fix issues quickly. In his new role, Buytaert will expand Percona’s observability offerings and help shape the company’s product and partner strategy.

“When something goes wrong, the database often gets the blame, even when the real issue is somewhere else,” said Buytaert. “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.”

Buytaert’s appointment builds on Percona’s recently announced partnership with Coroot, which brings full-stack observability to open source database environments. Coroot Percona Edition complements Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) by extending visibility beyond the database to the applications, networks, and infrastructure around it. Earlier this week, Percona also announced the General Availability of PMM High Availability.

“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, 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.”

Based in Belgium, Buytaert joins Percona from Inuits, where he was co-founder and CTO. He co-founded devopsdays in 2009 and has helped organize the conference series ever since, as well as running the CfgMgmtCamp, one of the largest open source infrastructure automation conferences. Buytaert serves as an ambassador for the Continuous Delivery Foundation, and speaks regularly at international conferences on monitoring, observability, infrastructure as code, and continuous delivery.

About Percona
Percona is an open source database software, support, and services company with a simple belief: organizations should have full control over their data infrastructure, without lock-in, without compromise, and without paying a vendor for the privilege of leaving. For 20 years, Percona has helped businesses run databases such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Valkey, and Redis securely, performantly, and on their own terms — through freely available open source software, 24/7 expert support, and hands-on database expertise. The way is open. For more information, visit www.percona.com.

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