Hello Dynatrace Community!
I’m very happy to welcome you to the first Community Member of the Month article in the new Forum. Our winner for March is @bill_scheuernst - someone with a great passion towards Dynatrace and technology. He’s a great representation of what we are looking for in the users of our Forum – he shows curiosity in questions and creativity and knowledge in product ideas. Let’s get to know him a little bit better, in the interview below.
Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?
I currently work at Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City as a Performance Monitoring Engineer. I am responsible for the administration, deployment, education, adoption of the Dynatrace tool (SaaS) and enterprise monitoring in general.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
I was hired as a contractor and then as an employee to manage and administer Dynatrace AppMon originally. Our initial project was to monitor our team owned applications and middleware, especially around MQ and IIB. We purchased NAM a year later, and then migrated to SaaS a year after that. We started our conversion to SaaS by using the tool for RUM and Synthetic capabilities to monitor 3rd Party SaaS applications. Career-wise, I started using Dynatrace products when working for Sprint. I used Gomez Synthetic and Keynote Synthetic extensively over the course of several years.
Have you ever had any interesting use case for Dynatrace product that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
Every use case is particularly interesting especially since BlueKC uses many different technologies. As I said earlier, we got our feet wet with Dynatrace by using the Synthetic and Real User Monitoring capabilities. This was for a use case to monitor 3rd Party SaaS products; in this case, it was WorkDay which had recently been deployed company wide. The APM team, which at the time, consisted of myself only, worked with the business on monitoring requirements. We took these requirements and applied our available tools. We used Synthetic and RUM to monitor the web traffic from BlueKC using the Chrome browser plugin, which had just been released. Since WorkDay was a third-party product and had no real insight to the availability of the „front door”, we consulted with Lucas Hocker, who suggested we use DCRUM (NAM 2019) to monitor network activity to WorkDay.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
I was brought to the community as a means to learn more about a particular functionality, supported technology, feature, and capability. While I had a lot of experience with the classic synthetic tools, I hadn’t used a tool like Dynatrace AppMon before and was very much a rookie. Having spent close to 13 years at Sprint in the web space (IT and Digital Business), I was extremely knowledgeable with web technologies, but was not familiar with an APM tool. Early in my career at BlueKC I asked a lot of questions, attended webinars, and watched videos. I met Andreas Grabner when he was here in Kansas City. I asked him a lot of questions as well but also found the Community to be an excellent source of information. Shortly thereafter we had a DevOps engagement with Brett Hofer who really helped catapult my interest in Dynatrace and passion for the tool, the company, and the APM space in general.
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
As I am now a full-time work at home employee, it seems my passion is geared towards fully implementing Dynatrace at BlueKC. As an escape from the computer, my passion now is remodeling my home. I also have a passion for spending time with my family in Colorado, where I grew up. Any activity in Colorado, especially in the mountains, is refreshing and peaceful. I enjoy cycling, fly-fishing, and hiking. I’ve also watched my bubbles float up from 100’ underwater in the Bahamas and Florida.
It would also be great if you could share with us your favorite movie, song and/or a book. Let other Community members discover something new and interesting to watch/hear/read 🙂
I haven’t had much opportunity to read but I do enjoy David Baldacci novels. Also, the novel by Gene Kim, “The Phoenix Project” is an excellent book. Every page read I could relate to my current position and previous jobs. It seems my mind races around a lot and I’m always asking myself, “Can something do this or that?”. Or “what would happen if this was done?”. In regard to Dynatrace, most of the time the answer is “Yes, it can be done” and then I investigate and inquiry about it until I’m able to implement it. Using the Community has helped with this along with Dynatrace resources I’ve worked with along the way (most notably at the Linz and Gdansk locations). In regard to my home projects and life journey, I’m always finding ways to continue learning.
I’d like to close this response to you by saying that while this job is very demanding and stressful,
It’s incredible to hear that Bill, thank you so much! It’s a real pleasure to have you, both as a part of Dynatrace family and as a member of this Community. Also, I’m super jealous of your photo with Davis 😊
2 Comments
