There are some people in the Community who bring smiles to other faces like the sun after a foggy and rainy week. People who are not only experts working in the field of IT and with proven extensive knowledge in using and extending Dynatrace but as well people with a great sense of humor. 😉
Henk Stobbe, our DynaMight and Community Member of the Month for December, is an example of one of these people. He started his career in IT many years ago, and continuous learning is important for him as he has a growth mindset directed at working with modern tools, building interesting things, and helping other users on their path of growth with Dynatrace.
We invite you to read and check how exactly @henk_stobbe is… walking through the IT world and through life.
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Can you share some details about your past? What is your story, and how it happened that you decided to work in IT / APM area?
Hello, my name is Henk Stobbe and I was born and raised in Den Helder, an average-sized town, home to the most important naval base in the Netherlands. So you see the perfect place to grow up for a curious boy. If you like to read more about this town and its history, please check the Wiki link,
After spending far too much time at “Johannes College”, I finished when I was 21, and my parents decided it was time to get a proper job. Because IT was a big promise at that time, I started my career at the former Dutch telephone company. Not as many people as a COBOL-programmer, but as an I/O operator. This was a long, long time ago, so I think I have seen it all, the punch card, the paper tape, and magnetic tapes. The world consisted of mainframes running batches and always printing output.
Fast forwarding through time, I worked with, for that moment in time, many new technologies. Some of them disappeared, and some still exist today.
Can you tell me a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work, and what do you do in your job?
Working for Atos in Groningen, a Dynatrace partner, I’m supporting many different customers on the cloud and managed Dynatrace instances. As a Senior APM Consultant, I work on implementing and maintaining Dynatrace within different customer organizations. Customers can be located worldwide, so much work is done remotely.
I am also developing extensions, based on the 2.0 framework. These can be found on Dynatrace Hub. For me, the extension 2.0 framework is the best technical improvement for 2022. To move away from a programming-like structure in the original framework to a safe, standardized, and descriptive framework collecting metrics from SNMP, Prometheus, WMI, and SQL. It’s a really great improvement from a user point of view. I advise everybody to take a closer look at this framework, as it will give you a perfect insight into the workings of Dynatrace from a metric perspective.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products, and for what project?
The road that led me to Dynatrace APM started when I was active as a performance tester. When combining my broad experience and working with large organizations, I found myself often being drawn into so-called “war room” situations. In one of these situations, someone must have proposed to use or implement the Dynatrace tool. When I looked at it, I noticed that the tool fitted me like a glove! As you need to have noticed, we have arrived in the APPMON/DCRUM/Synthetic period. At that stage, I found that the best resource for learning Dynatrace at that time – was webinars from @andreas_grabner, so thanks, Andi!
Have you ever had any interesting use case for the Dynatrace platform that you found to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
Now, I can’t wait to get my hands on Grail! The Dynatrace is a great product, but a personal complaint has away been that the collected data is only available through Dynatrace interface/API. This is usually not a problem but sometimes what you’re looking for is not available, and you would like to have a calculated metric yesterday before it was defined, or you really would like to add your own specific data into Dynatrace.
All this seems to be addressed with Grail. Keeping all the good stuff but adding a Data Lakehouse to store all observability data, accessible by DQL, so really can’t wait to see it and check it by myself!
What brought you to our Community? What is your best memory about it?
Almost at the same time when I started to watch Andi’s webinars, I discovered the Community.
What part or parts of the Dynatrace Community do you like the most?
I think the best part is the question and answers. This is where many different issues and ideas are discussed, and answers are found. The second, best is the “Product ideas” part, where users can interact with Dynatrace about missing features and enhancements we would like to have added to the product.
There is one more thing I like to add. As Dynatrace is expanding in multiple areas, it will cause more variance in its usage. This gives the community added value when members show smart and maybe alternative ways how to use the tool. To put it in other words, Dynatrace builds functionality, and we as a Community can share how we use it and, of course, why we like it so much. 😊
That’s why I also started to share my tips and tricks. Explaining things from my perspective or just emphasizing new, exciting, and useful functionality. As I received much positive feedback, I’ll continue with this. Maybe it is time for a Blog post? Please remember that sharing is caring!
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.
A few of my favorite things. Gardening, and as you could see at the beginning of the article in the picture, a lot of work has to be done there.
The music of Nightwish, a Finnish symphonic metal band with the Dutch singer Floor Jansen, if you’re not into that, you’re out of luck, but if you’re interested, you can check the below YouTube link.
And as we’re getting close to Christmas, my all-time favorite movie with Nicolas (this can not be a coincidence) Cage. A movie that will you makes you feel good without being tacky. Again, a link if you want to read more => LINK.
Abut books - Sorry, I don’t read real books, only documentation. 😉
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
My favorite pastime is walking. Turning off my mobile, stepping out of my car, and walking in nature is the best way for me to clear my mind. I think that walking is not about getting to a destination, but it’s about the journey itself. It also happened to me that a solution to a problem I was working on popped into my head while thinking about my sore feet. My advice to everybody, please give it a try, it may improve your Dynatrace skills even more. 😉
And see below the picture taken in Ireland. I Think no more explanation is needed.
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Henk, we’re happy that you accompany all of us on the journey of working with and extending Dynatrace. We see and appreciate your activity not only as a Community member but overall as a person. 😊
Having you in the Community, Dynatrace users can feel safer as walking with other people like you gives the energy to keep on going “until the end” and ensure that we will find the right direction together.
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