In May, on the Dynatrace Community Member of the Month stage, we would love to present you Ingrida Tamosaityte-Ehrig - an IT specialist in analysis and a Product Management Coach in the financial sector. A woman who discovers with curiosity new secrets and features of Dynatrace, learning from any available source and along the way sharing knowledge and helping other Community members.
Read more about @Ingrida and get to know her better.
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Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?
I have a master's in mathematics actually, but I started to work as a web developer/designer, IT-news blogger and IT books writer in Lithuania during my study time, then reallocated to Germany with my family. Here I started kinda “from the beginning” working at University and teaching pure Statistics core theory for a few years before switching to “real IT-Company” Amadeus Data Processing GmbH. Here I started as a performance analyst with data analytics using SAS, at some point switched to Product Owner for homegrown monitoring software slowly diving deeper into “all things around” like Operations, Development, UX, etc (whatever you do if you have nobody else to do it and you are curious how it can be done). On the way I was touching quite all software possible starting (as mentioned above) with SAS, using MapR, Elastic, Mongo, Ansible, Splunk, Prometheus, Grafana, Thanos…
Meanwhile, I started to look around for more challenges, and then, something around mid-2020 I saw on LinkedIn that someone is looking for a Monitoring Expert, so I just took my chance. Even if it was something I’d never heard before in the package: Dynatrace. Because why not? So, here I am now: in German they say “Mädchen für Alles”: bit Project management, bit (quite a big bit) Python for Dynatrace deployment and configuration automation, supporting right set up of change and problem management… and at the same time using amazing opportunity to learn complete different Work Culture and amazing new coworkers (even if sometimes they drive me really crazy), deep crash-dive Python and of cause most deep dive Dynatrace ever: a completely new approach of monitoring (kinda ready to go after the agent is there) and completely new area of monitoring: Web applications.
So, every day is still a day to learn something new and to teach others something new as well.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
As a short touch before, I learned Dynatrace a year I changed to work with my new employer from the financial sector. First getting some hands-on training in the company, then discovering Dynatrace University, a bit later, after it was hard to find answers in docs and we started to “cross boundaries” of standard use cases of Dynatrace, discovered Dynatrace Community. As in my company, it is still a very new tool too (and a completely different monitoring approach as used before) it is a huge learning process happening for both, the company I work for in general and for me personally. Selection of Dynatrace as a central monitoring tool in the project was done before I started, so last year I was working to help and participate in making sure Dynatrace can be rolled out on whole our ecosystem (at least as much as possible) and to make sure our internal users can get the most value out of the new tool. Last but not least: a lot of investment goes into the integration of Dynatrace with other Operational IT Infrastructures like Orchestration, CMDB, or Problem and Change Management in the company IT department. Along the way, I see a lot of benefits of using Dynatrace and looking forward to discovering new features and making the best of them.
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?
Actually, we have one ahead of us: the company I work for has a set of applications that have dependencies in between: some of them can start processing just after others have already processed certain data and delivered results already. So it is a kinda delivery pipeline or even IT Manufacturing Processing Line (?). What is wished is to monitor and visualize this flow in Dynatrace. To see where the process is “stuck”. I am not sure if/how we can do it with Dynatrace yet. Let’s see. 🙂
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
Why I've started to use Dynatrace Community? I think for every developer Stack Overflow is something that you can’t imagine living without. At some point, while using a Software Product same can be said about the community: you have to go there because documentation is not giving you sufficient answers anymore. And either you find somebody who suffers from the same problem, or (if you are lucky) somebody who already solved this problem. Then you are a lucky one. And now is your turn to give your knowledge back to the Community.
My most interesting experience was actually this one: Solved: Re: OneAgent Updates window not working - Dynatrace Community. Actually, it is not solved yet, but I liked the exchange happening around this question. It is exactly how the Community works.
Why do you think it’s worth being a part of the Dynatrace Community? Why do you contribute to the Community?
I would like to use Dynatrace Community for several purposes:
What part or parts of Dynatrace Community do you like the most?
A few days ago I wanted to create an RFE for something and decided to look in the Product Ideas subforum… wow… you can stick for hours there… and give a lot of Kudos away. An amazing thing people think about.
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
Life outside IT is difficult… if you have your husband working in IT too then it is double difficult… and if you have a home automation system with crappy data analytics framework it becomes nearly impossible. 🙂
But then I want to get rid of IT in my head I practice Martial Arts and since recently Yoga and Meditation. The last two years were quite hard for it as Martial Arts were the first thing to be forbidden and the last one to be allowed as it is a full-contact sport, where you cannot maintain social distancing. In our small Jiu-Jitsu team we call this S/M sport. You go multiple times a week to the dojo to hurt others and get hurt by others just to learn how to hurt someone who wants to hurt you one day. And then you start to learn “50 ways to hurt or kill somebody” your most important lesson in essence stays one: the best way to win a fight is to avoid it in the first place. On the top, you learn to trust your training partner and you learn “to stop before it breaks” and “to hurt just as much as you can bear as after you are your partners turn to hurt you”. Amazing experience in human relationships. And amazing friendships you gain there.
So, why do I go twice a week truth all this? Jiu-Jitsu means “soft Art”. It’s not about power or weapons. It’s about your mind. Don’t fear a knife or gun, the fear the mind which controls it. Look at the eyes, learn about your enemy, find his weak point, and use his energy to fight him. It’s absolutely fascinating how the human body and mind work and how you can use and trick them. And the same technics and tricks can be applied in everyday life too.
For a few months, I am occasionally helping in refugee camps for Ukrainians. I speak Russian (not Ukrainian!), so as I went there I saw my most important value is to work as an interpreter between worlds, and not just in language but in culture too as I grow up in the Soviet Union. It is so horrible to see ppl who were living their own happy lives fully helpless and controlled by others in every step of their lives as they lost everything and are now fully dependent on others. In a few weeks, I will act as an interpreter for a psychological session for traumatized Ukrainian mothers with kids and I feel scared about it…. What will come there… It is not “what I like to do in my free time”, but it is “what every one of us has to do to help” these people who lost their homes.
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. 😊
...and as a Martial Art student of cause my favorite movies include “Kill Bill” and “Matrix”. Yes, fighting scenes, yes, a lot of discussions if it is really possible, but sometimes just enjoy the action. And with “Matrix” we start to go to IT Business just to jump to “Lord of the Rings”, which of cause gets beaten by original books immediately. Same valid for Dune, which I am rereading again currently (“And I say: ‘Look! I have no hands!’ But the people all around me say: ‘What are hands?’”). It would be really hard for me to choose one or even a few of my favorite books, but for sure Tolkien and Douglas Adams will be the ones on my shortlist, followed by Frank Herbert and of cause Isaac Asimov (yes, “Foundation Series” is The Thing, but if you really want to have a real SC try “The Gods Themselves”, absolutely chilling and amazing).
Actually, one book/author is following me for a very, very long and it’s the kinda everyday bible for me: H2G2 (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Best book ever! Depending on what your mood is you can read it as a comedy, as science fiction, as society critics, as… and you always, always find something you have not seen/read before. And you always know where your towel is (btw, the 25th of May is towel day!)
“So long and thanks for all the fish!” (DNA, H2G2)
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We’re always amazed by how interesting Dynatrace Community members are. It was a pleasure to get to know you better, Ingrida. You are an extraordinary, capable woman with a huge heart 😊
It's only a matter of time until you become a Dynatrace master, and that's what the Community team wishes you! We would be happy to see your progress, and truly believe that along the way you will help many more users.