Jonah Kowall

Jonah Kowall trained in computer science and co-founded one of the first content filtering companies in the late 1990s. Kowall became a security expert committing code to both the FreeBSD project and helped build the first wireless cracking algorithms. Jonah received his Certified Information Systems Security Professional and Certified Information Systems Auditor along with several infrastructure-related certifications and awards. Throughout 15 years as a practitioner and manager across both startups and large enterprises, Kowall focused on infrastructure and operations, security and performance engineering. He spearheaded both tactical and strategic operational initiatives, going deep into monitoring and tuning of infrastructure and applications.

In 2011, Kowall changed careers, moving to Gartner to focus on availability and performance monitoring and IT operations management. He speaks on and writes research globally for IT leaders and CIOs. Kowall led Gartner's influential application performance monitoring and created the network performance monitoring and diagnostics magic quadrants, in addition to creating the Network Packet Broker term and market. In 2015, Kowall joined AppDynamics, helping drive the company's corporate development, product strategy and vision. He developed new products with technical partners for entry into new markets, including product managing, building and launching new products with IBM, SAP and ServiceNow. AppDynamics was acquired by Cisco in 2017 to drive its software strategy and create IT and business alignment. Kowall then joined Kentik in 2019 as CTO to set company and product vision and strategy and execute it by running the product management organization. Kentik is the leader in network analytics for today’s leading brands and is forging the path as the foundational AI for IT operations platform for network professionals.