Hello Dynatrace Community!
The first Employee Member of the Month in the brand-new Forum is a real legend in this Community. Let’s all congratulate @JamesKitson, who became the EMOM for the second time in this award history! We can’t think of anyone else who deserves this recognition more as the first person in our new platform – James showed us his incredible passion and knowledge in thousands of posts over the years. Let’s read more about him in this short interview.
Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? What is your role in the company and what do you do in your job?
I recently moved from the consultant role over to being a member of the Platform Extensions team where I develop custom extensions for customers and make use of Dynatrace in unique and interesting ways.
What Dynatrace products do you use? What do you like the most about them?
These days I mostly spend time with extensions in Dynatrace unsurprisingly. Somewhat related to this I also enjoy the process of getting really good alerts in place. It’s quite satisfying to get the perfect alert in place where it’s actionable with no false positives and especially when there is minimal overhead in maintaining it!
Have you ever had any interesting use case for the Dynatrace product, that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
Most people know that extensions/plugins are primarily about getting external data into Dynatrace for Davis to analyze. But especially with ActiveGate extensions you can do nearly anything you want since you write the Python. There are interesting extensions out there that do things like interact with the Dynatrace API and even dynamically modify dashboards in ways that are not yet currently possible via the UI. When brushing up on extensions I practiced by making one that updates a dashboard with a new Cat Fact every minute!
Why do you contribute to the Community? What is your best memory about it?
I enjoy helping people figure out how to solve problem and accomplish goals when they already have the required components and just need to put things in the right place (i.e. set up the right configuration). My favorite memory is the time when I had the realization that I was contributing more to the Community than I was consuming from it!
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
I listen to lots of podcasts and books about a wide variety of topics. One of my favorite subjects is signals intelligence and things like cryptography.
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 🙂
One of my favorite podcasts is Darknet Diaries. Despite the name it’s not always about the “darknet” but rather just interesting stories told in an approachable way about things a variety of topics primarily centered in technology.
Thank you for the interview James and for your continuous support for the Community! The podcast you’ve mentioned sounds super interesting, I have to check it out 😊
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