“Starting from scratch”. Does it mean resetting and forgetting the information and everything that happened, that we have experienced? Or maybe our experiences and lessons learned when we’re aware of them can be a strength, great help, or even superpower in the future? Maybe starting from scratch is just a new stage, moving towards a change? If we take a look at the beginning, we can see that the beginning of something new is at the same time the end of something else, and sometimes a small change can make a huge difference.
In November, we’re happy to introduce János Mizsei, who in the past decided to start from scratch. And because of this change, he‘s with us today, growing and helping others.
Read about Mizső, our Community Member of the Month, and check in detail about how his life journey looked like.
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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 grew up in the last years of the communist regime in Hungary. My age group similar to me learned pascal and dbaseIII+ languages in the late 80s, and early 90s. on the first x86 machines. I graduated summa cum laude in 1996. and since then, I have worked in different IT areas. In the first decade, I was in the IT hardware business until 2005 as a retail company deputy manager. I felt that something was missing from my professional life (touch the keyboard 😊), so I decided to change and didn’t regret it at all.
I started everything from scratch, again. I joined an international insurance company (AVIVA) local IT operation team as a rookie IT administrator. I worked hard and diligently, and I soon became the Hungarian branch CIO in 2011. The project portfolio was amazing when a US-based global insurance company MetLife took over the AVIVA Eastern European branches. I had a chance to manage the Hungarian entities IT merge (including the core systems) and rebranding. In the following years we had a lot of interesting projects with my team and peers like the relocation of our local data centers to IBM Poland or the introduction of paperless workflow processes in operation and implementation of a tablet-based application for sales as part of the digital transformation. So, it was not a boring period for me and my team. However, I was elected the “Metlife Hungary manager of the year” by the whole staff in 2016., this fairy tale ended in 2017, when the international cost-cutting and centralization wave reached the Hungarian business unit... Unfortunately, I had to leave my team and find new challenges.
Then I joined the K&H bank (KBC group) IT operation team as a Head of Web Based Application Operations. It was also a very exciting period in my professional life, I had a chance to work with a lot of technologies and use my enterprise experiences in a much bigger local IT organization (500+). My team was responsible for more than 2.000 JVM (95% Weblogic) everyday operations in different pillars which were challenging in this old-school silo IT organization with a lack of observability. In 2019 my team “won” an additional task which was application performance monitoring. It was a time when my amazing journey has been started with Dynatrace.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
At K&H bank in 2019 I “inherited” an unfinished, almost done project called “Implementation of Monitoring Strategy”. This project focused on the implementation of AppMon, ELK and Nagios XI. When I took over the project, I have not heard about anything from Dynatrace. After the AppMon – Dynatrace OneAgent “upgrade” I was curious, I gradually explored the platform functionalities in my free time (touching the keyboard was missed again 😊) and soon I realized that it is a very useful platform for the whole organization including IT operation, IT development and the business also. I became an enthusiastic fan because I saw the possibilities and advantages of the platform (as a client).
The whole philosophy of the platform and its unique features are amazing. It dramatically simplified the whole IT team’s everyday life and supported the digital transformation and automation of the organization. I noticed that I spent more and more time with Dynatrace, and I became the ambassador of the platform within the organization. At the end of last year, I decided to leave my leadership role at the bank and join the local Dynatrace VAR partner Telvice cPlc as a Dynatrace expert to follow my dreams and continue the promotion of Dynatrace at the country level and help organizations with my enterprise experience to take the advantages and benefits from the platform. I am a true Dynatrace believer.
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?
The last instructive use case happened with my colleague which demonstrate the power of Dynatrace for me. Because of the pandemic, the need for parcel services increased in the past years. One of our clients installed 88 parcel delivery machines on the country level. There was a major release change on the delivery machines and the backend parts also. They had three unsuccessful release changes on consecutive weekends (whit a lot of costs). Finally, they turned to us to help them.
We had very limited information about the infrastructure and the application. The symptom was very simple. After the release changes and the first few transactions the backend servers (Jboss) always had CPU and memory saturations. During the 4th release change, we also participated in the process and finally found that it was a program code issue (we all know that this can never happen 😊). We investigated the problem with the trace function and turned out that one wrong database transaction loaded the whole database (millions of records) into the memory and killed the Jboss instances and the VMs. It was a huge code mistake and pointed out that there was no proper performance testing at all. This case proved for the client the capabilities of Dynatrace.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
During my professional life, I tried many community sites, but I did not use them too much because there was a lot of rubbish and useless things on them. The Dynatrace Community was a pleasant surprise for me in this matter. There is another important attractive factor for me that I can virtually “meet” a lot of valuable community members and I can learn from them because I know that I am not the “sharpest knife in the drawer,” and it is not a shame to learn from others.
Why do you think it’s worth being a part of the Dynatrace Community? Why do you contribute to the Community?
I could mention a lot of things about why I started to contribute to the Dynatrace Community and why I “activated” myself. I would highlight the most important ones for me. Firstly, I really enjoy helping other people to find solutions to their problems and guiding them with my advice. I have gained a lot of experience with the platform in recent years, and I would like to share it with the community members and my clients. I guess it came from my leadership legacy. Secondly, I can meet a lot of interesting problems and questions that are waiting to be solved, and this awareness inspires and motivates me like the other community members.
What part or parts of the Dynatrace Community do you like the most?
This is both a difficult and an easy question. One of my favorites is the Dynatrace product ideas. It is a perfect solution to hear “the voice of the customers” and in my point of view involving customers in product development is a crucial success factor for Dynatrace. I also must mention the Community challenges which differentiate the site from other community sites and provides a bit of fun for me in the everyday rush.
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
I am interested in a lot of things in my free time: history (visiting historical places, architecture), nature, sports, sci-fi, fantasy, and Japanese cars. My favorite historical periods are medieval and ancient European / Asian history, especially the biography of rulers and royal families. I am a big fan of historical movies however in many cases they’re not historically accurate. When I turned 40, I started to regularly run for fun and charity purposes to collect money for children with cancer. In the past years, I participated many running events as an individual runner or relay team member (ultra-running race around lake Balaton – 211 km). My most memorable event was when I finished one of my half-marathons with my little kid (he was sitting on my neck).
Recently I have already started my family tree investigation. The first surprising result was for me that from my mother’s side maybe I have South Slavik origins from the Balkans. I am going to continue this investigation and collect the evidence because it is very exciting. My favorite series is GOT. My dream car is Honda NSX.
It would also be great if you could share with us your favorite movie, song, and/or book. Let other Community members discover something new and interesting to watch/hear/read.
My last movie rewatch was the Hidden figures. It is an amazing story with a lot of emotion about the African American women’s vital role and contribution to the early space projects at NASA.
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Janos, you did, and you do a great job! When you started on a new path, there were probably bound to be obstacles that got in the way, and it was not an easy journey. But now, it’s really nice to see that you’re looking for strategies, tools, and knowledge to continue your journey. More than that we’re proud to see that along the way you support others on their journey with Dynatrace as well. Community team and Community users.
Never give up and follow your heart! Fingers crossed for you!