We have a real pleasure to present to you the newest Community Member of the Month for December. Let's all congratulate the winner – Enrico Favretto!
We did a short interview with him, so we can all know him a little bit better:
Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where are you working and what are you doing in your job?
I'm currently part of the "Application Monitoring Services" team at Axa Switzerland AG where I work as a Performance Engineer and Systems Specialist. Our team provides application monitoring and load testing solutions/expertise to our many internal product teams. In my current role I benefit a lot from my background as a former SW developer as well as from over a decade of experience in using Dynatrace products as a power user and DevOps associate.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
I first came into contact with AppMon quite early on (I think it was version 2.x or something) as a Java developer where I mostly used it for profiling code during system tests as well as for the usual firefighting exercises in production :). With the increased adoption of the AppMon and Synthetic products as an integrated APM platform I became part of a dedicated team of people with the suitable set of skills and mindset to build/operate efficient application monitoring and performance management solutions as well as to quickly analyze the "big picture" and even fix high-priority issues as they occurred in production. I guess today one would call this "Site Reliability Engineering" – but that was well before Google coined the term :).
Did you ever had any interesting use case for Dynatrace product, that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
Although we only just completed our migration from AppMon/Synthetic to Dynatrace Managed not so long ago (after an extensive testing and evaluation phase that lasted almost a year) we already had some great user feedback and use cases. What's been particularly helpful in our case is the definition of custom devices for hosts/services that are either outside of our "control zone" or don't easily support insights via OneAgent (mostly HW/SW appliances). Also notable is the capability to ingest and analyze logs from SW appliances such as WAF's and proxies and correlate resulting custom metrics with the rest of our environment.
And last but not least it's certainly a big plus to have a unified management interface for full-stack, infrastructure, synthetic and log monitoring.
Dynatrace products have always been influential to me over the years in my various DevOps roles as they were always able to help me get the insights I needed – sometimes even beyond that in unexpected ways. But what actually excites me the most about Dynatrace is its unique ability to make extremely complex IT ecosystems transparent and tangible while providing the opportunity to learn useful and interesting new aspects simply by having the possibility to observe software in action in unprecedented depth and breadth.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
It has been a valuable source of practical information and whenever time allows, I browse through the posts and try to respond to any open questions where I feel competent enough to provide useful input.
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
Other than devoting most of my free time to my family I love to follow science-related topics and discussions, especially at the intersection of basic research in the fields of consciousness, AI and physics/metaphysics. I've always been intrigued and inspired to learn from radically new contenders for a "theory of everything" with my current favorite being simulation theory as I'm pretty convinced, we're all playing it out in a digital matrix :). Other than that, I love to bring together my life-long passion for aviation and IT as I tinker with flight simulation and VR on my home rig on quiet evenings 🙂
It would also be great if you could share with us your favorite movie, song and/or a book. Let other members of community discover something new and interesting to watch/hear/read 🙂
I'm a fan of science-fiction and unconventional/surreal movies therefore among my favorites are genre-defining ones like Bladerunner, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Contact, Arrival, etc. and on the surrealist side, I love almost everything put out by directors such as David Lynch, Terry Gilliam and Jean-Pierre Jeunet…
I'm not anymore into reading books as I used to due to time constraints etc. but when it happens it's mostly about non-fiction and science-related topics. However, I've always kept a soft spot for the novels by Haruki Murakami as they resonate with me on many levels. Besides, I like to regularly exercise my mind using an online subscription on Brilliant.org – which I would highly recommend to everyone 🙂
Once again thank you, Enrico, for your contribution in the forum and congratulations for winning the Community Member of the Month! We are happy that you are a part of our forum and we can’t wait to hear more from you.