In February, we are happy to announce that the Community Member of the Month award goes to Gil Givati. @gilgi is an artistic individual showing his creativity in the music and business scenes.
Below you can see how his hobby, attitude, and commitment to showing up regularly and helping on Dynatrace Community influence his growth and everyday work.
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Can you tell us a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?
I'm heading the Dynatrace technical team in the Matrix products division in Israel. We're the Dynatrace regional partner. Our team is performing the complete suite of services in our region, from sales engineering through product support and of course product implementations and education.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our platform and for what project?
I've been working with Dynatrace products since 2010. This wasn't a specific project that demanded that, but the whole market needed something else. As I've been consulting organizations on how to do production application monitoring and headed the Israel Web Performance Optimization meetup group, working with Dynatrace in Matrix was the only natural thing to do even then. Since then, names like Gomez, DCRUM, AppMon, and obviously Dynatrace are part of my daily vocabulary just like TV and Food.
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?
Holding my position and the years with Dynatrace in Israel, there are so many use cases and stories that it's hard to pick a specific one, so I'll just pick one of our latest. We have been working with one of the government offices to help improve the end-user experience of one of the COVID-related applications. People were complaining in general about poor performance and the organization needed to know exactly what is happening. After implementing Dynatrace across the board, it clearly pointed us to the biggest users' pain, which was a specific search action, being executed many times a day and taking tens of seconds in many cases. By Using Dynatrace RUM and its end-to-end PurePaths we were able to improve the main database query and some of the UI behavior and now this is just flying.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
I've been a member of the community for many years now. Working daily with the Dynatrace teams, cooperating with partners around the world (just as Dynatrace encourages), the community seemed only natural to join.
Why do you think it’s worth being a part of the Dynatrace Community?
Sometimes, even the most novice Dynatrace user can provide the solution, just because he faced a similar situation a few days back.
What part or parts of the Dynatrace Community do you like the most?
I love the open discussions and challenges the community presents daily. There is obviously a personal satisfaction when you see a question and you say to yourself: " Hey! I know how to do this. Let's help others". Obviously, roadmaps and feature requests feedback are highly important to us as we and our customers are inventing new challenging use cases for Dynatrace, just because it seems the platform can do this.
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
Music. I've started playing when I was 7 and ever since I've had the real joy of being able to play in different situations and on different instruments. Today I mostly play the trombone, keyboard, and bass guitar. I'm part of a Jazz Orchestra and when thinking about it, I guess a lot of what I've learned in my musical experience (including improvisations) was more than useful in my professional life.
For example, one of the things they keep telling you when playing music in front of an audience is to proceed (and not stop) whenever there is a problem or you (or any other member of the band) made a mistake. As Bernard Shaw once said: "the show must go on!". It's the same when you're an SE. If something in your demo or presentation doesn't go as expected - just continue towards the same end goal. If you'll be confident, the audience may not even see the problem itself. You could also find similarities in the need to listen (not hear but listen) to the overall sounds around you but still be able to focus on just a specific one when needed in order to maintain the right balance of your role.
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. 😊
It's hard to select one so I'll just take something that represents what I think is required to be a great "figure in Dynatrace": being able to know what you're doing on different aspects and have the ability to switch between your skills quickly. For that reason, I would recommend you watch James Morrison, possibly one of today's biggest jazz players doing his thing at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viaWRq1JHGY
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It was great to hear your story! You inspired me a lot so now I see the connection between the business and music. In music - if you play for people from your heart, it will come back to you with reciprocity, you will see it in the group of your fans. The same situation is in business - if you are humble and take a genuine interest in your customers’ needs, they will take a genuine interest in you and your offer. And in both situations, well in life generally, you must learn how to deal with rejection and the simple fact that not everybody is going to like or understand what you do, but the most important thing is to keep going.
Gil, I truly believe that the biggest of your show is yet to come, both in music and in business. 🔝
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