Hello, Dynatrace Community!
Meet our great Community Member of the Month, @sean_mcconville! Sean has been with us since AppMon times and contributed over 100 posts to this amazing Community. Read below where he pushed the boundaries for some Dynatrace use cases and what he likes the most about the Dynatrace Community!
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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 work at Kingfisher – not the beer unfortunately but the European home improvement retailer (The European version of home depot).
I’ve been collecting metrics, monitoring things, and creating alerts to wake people up at 2am for well over a decade. Starting with some classic infrastructure tools like ITM and SCOM and then moving to setup and evangelize transactional monitoring with Dynatrace AppMon around 8-9 years ago.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
We had a very basic up/down monitoring in place across our e-commerce sites. We were challenged to improve this and began with our Screwfix operation - this was proven to give unprecedented insight to support and we quickly followed with instrumentation the B&Q website and the rest of the group then began shifting left. This eventually spiraled into covering internal & external apps and extended to covering middleware tiers.
With over 5 years of rules, dashboards, and staff experience built into our AppMon deployment, it was an interesting challenge to get everyone on-board and up to speed with the new Dynatrace tool. The ease of deployment with OneAgent made the technical changes a lot smoother.
Have you ever had any interesting use case for Dynatrace product that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
Automation is where we have pushed the boundaries for some Dynatrace use cases.
One example is when monitoring application servers that are local to each store. Because of the volume of stores around Europe, individual agent placement at each store was not chosen as an option. Instead, we now have a Dynatrace plugin which queries the application database to check for all stores that are marked as live. The plugin then creates http endpoint, checks against each application endpoint in a store, or disables any http checks if the store is no longer marked as live. By using predefined tags and incident integration with ServiceNow we generate a callout to a specific support team should a live store endpoint fail.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
You will also find me posting lots of RFEs.
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
Speed & performance have always been a passion, although usually involving an engine and 2/4 wheels. Lately things have taken more of a turn towards playgrounds/kids parties and theme parks.
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 🙂
Does a video game count? Try Factorio on Steam if you don’t value your free time.
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Sure the games count! I think we have much more game fans in the club than we think 😉 Thank you, Sean, for the interview and all your Community contributions!
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