Hi all!
We’re in the middle of the summer, so it’s a great time to relax a little bit and read some interviews 🙂 Community member of the month from August this time comes from Russia: let’s all congratulate @Mikhail A.! He’s active in all aspects of the forum: asking questions, commenting, choosing the best answers, that can help others and creating valuable and interesting product ideas. Thank you for being with us and let’s hear your story:
Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?
Hello Dynatrace Community!
For the last two years, I have been working at Lanit-Integration.
LANIT-Integration is a modern diversified company of Russia specializing in IT consulting, design, implementation and support of complex IT solutions.
I work as an engineer in the IT service management department. We are engaged in the implementation of various monitoring systems from infrastructure monitoring to application performance monitoring and business monitoring. We also do various DevOps projects.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
It just so happened that almost all of my IT work is related to Dynatrace.
I started working as a project manager for Dynatrace RFO in Russia.
Then there was the experience in the AppSupport department of Bank who use Dynatrace as a monitoring tool. It was a great job as I had to use the best tool to diagnose real problems 😉
And now I work just as closely with Dynatrace, introducing and configuring it for various orders in Russia
A year and a half ago I passed the exam of Dynatrace professional-level certificate
A couple of years ago I was even lucky to speak at a conference and tell people about how good Dynatrace is.
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?
I'll tell you about a case when, most probably, other systems besides the Dynatrace could not help us.
That was about 3-4 years ago when I worked in the AppSupport department of Bank. We were still working with AppMon then. We also actively switched to a microservice architecture at the time. All new projects were implemented on microservices.
For some projects, the deadlines were quite tight, and the development could not provide for something of quality.
One day one microservice crashed. We observed 100 memory load (about 10% in normal operation), user’s operations did not complete. It was a service for reporting for loan questionnaire applications from various partners. The department of accounting and analysis used it and looked at information on users and their loans.
Restarts did not help, the memory went back to 100%, the GarbageColletor worked out constantly but did not help.
The first thing we created and checked the thread dump and memory dump in Dynatrace.
There was clearly a bug at the code level from this analysis. But we could not identify the problematic method. The bright points displayed methods and classes that are present in all service operations. We opened a ticket for the developers and continued the analysis on our side.
We decided to see how it all started. We found the moment of the start of the memory leak and then opened the user operations. Dynatrace can display all custom operations, allowing deep analytics to understand the root cause. There is also a great ability to capture custom parameters.
As a result, we found 4 transactions, the execution time of which was 90 minutes and the status was not completed. Which means that they reached the time limit for operations in Dynatrace but in fact continued to perform. Based on the parameters, we determined that all these operations were from one user. Also, according to the captured parameters, we determined that the user made a request to search and display data in the report on all credit profiles for 1 year. Also, these four operations are performed one after the other at intervals of less than a minute.
The conclusion from these analytics is simple - the user made a request to search and display data, the system began to think and prepare the data output. Preloader was displayed in his browser at this time. The user thought the system was frozen and did a browser refresh and restarted the operation. And it did so four times.
The worst thing about this is that when the user restarted the browser, the old operation did not die, it also continued to search the database for all user data for a long period of time. As a result, 4 heavy operations in a row from one user killed the application. Restarting the service did not help, as it was required to clear the queue on the RabbitMQ (Then we were just switching to a rabbit and not all the admins on duty knew how to work with it).
This analysis took us less than an hour. The developers have fixed the application. But the most important thing, without the ability to analyze each individual operation and its parameters, we would not be able to identify the problem. Dynatrace saved us!
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
I really love Dynatrace. And I always want it to be the best! Some of my favourite section on the forum is Product ideas. For all the time I have created several dozen RFEs. A couple of them even have “completed” status 🙂
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
I love sports, especially team sports. I love playing basketball and tennis.
I also play board games for most of my life. This is a good time with friends as you are not only having fun, but you are training your brain with non-standard solutions.
Good spending of time I love to attend various electronic music festivals. I am very fond of Drum& bass and Techno.
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 🙂
As I said earlier, I really love listening to electronic music.
But I want to advise you on one cool Russian group - Little big. They are very popular outside Russia as well.
I mostly read classical literature. My favorite writer is Fyodor Dostoevsky.
I believe that anyone will enjoy his novels. Idiot, Brothers Karamazov and Demons are recommended for reading 😉
Couldn’t agree more on Dostoevsky 🙂 Thank you for sharing the story of how you were able to solve the problem for banking service – it’s always great to hear, when something that we are part of, is helping other people in their work in so many interesting ways. And thank you for being a part of our Community, we are really appreciating it!
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