“Full stack customer service”, that’s how we can describe Mark Bley, our Employee Member of the November.
When it comes to getting an answer, customers don’t care about boundaries or limitations – they simply want a fast, accurate, and helpful reply because most of the problems that arise generate high costs. Having the skills and knowledge to solve customer issues as fast as possible is some kind of a superpower 😉
To solve problems, mark_bley efficiently extends customer service support not only by solving issues by himself or looking for solutions but also by creating solutions that don’t exist yet. To meet customer expectations and improve customer satisfaction Mark uses Community, which helps him find answers and learn about things that other Dynatrace users experience. And even when looking for answers, Mark is helping the Community by supporting other Community members.
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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?
Before joining Dynatrace I was an embedded systems developer, besides CI/CD pipelines and git I never really worked with or around cloud technologies at all. I have always had a big interest and curiosity for everything around and going on in the cloud, and when the opportunity presented itself, I took it and joined Dynatrace. Now I work as a Lead Consultant in the DACH region working with government and finance/banking customers. My passion still continues to be automation and scripting, and thus I always strive to automate myself out of a role in order to pursue the next more challenging one.
What do you like the most about the Dynatrace platform? What parts of Dynatrace do you use?
I really like the ease of use of Dynatrace, you can just install the OneAgent, and basically, you’re ready to go start monitoring and digging into your applications and infrastructure. But even if this should not be the case, the flexibility you can leverage from the API and the Extensions SDK will help you monitor almost anything (literally the possibilities can be endless). I have had a ton of fun writing automation scripts (e.g. setting monitoring modes across environments taking into account specific rules) and simple extensions whenever we needed this little bit of extra Dynatrace.
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?
Once we were able to detect a hefty slowdown in the production environment. Due to it being a critical application and the production environment being hard to reproduce in the dev or staging environments no one had any idea that this was even going on before Dynatrace was deployed. Having just a brief look around the response times in the Distributed Traces and digging a bit deeper it was clear that the synchronous calls being made to databases could be rearranged in an asynchronous fashion bringing the overall response time down a 90%.
Why do you think it's worth being a part of the Dynatrace Community? Why do you contribute to the Community?
I was always very passionate about open source and the sharing of knowledge. In my spare time, I also contribute to other open-source projects. At first, when I started at Dynatrace I felt very welcomed everyone taught well, and I learned a lot really fast. With time passing and myself acquiring more knowledge about the platform I felt ready and motivated to jump in here and do the same for others.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
Starting with Dynatrace and even now I still find myself rummaging and finding very valuable information in the Community. I haven’t been around for that long here, but I see it as a valuable place for knowledge and experience sharing.
What part or parts of the Dynatrace Community do you like the most?
The Products ideas section is probably my favorite one. Reading through all the feedback from everyone and the interesting proposals that come in every day help make Dynatrace even better
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
Whenever I have the chance, I love to go back home (Spain) to the beach and surf for a bit. Since 2019 we have adopted a dog, named Chacho, from the shelter and love going on hikes to the nearby Alps and having a swim in the lakes or rivers to cool off.
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.
This will probably cause a bit of an uproar among the cinema enthusiast here (hehe), but I am a big fan of the Tremors movies, they have this outlaw and sci-fi feeling to them that I really love. Regarding books, my favorite author must be Isaac Asimov and his Foundation trilogy. Moreover, his short stories always have this feeling where they really suck you into his world for a brief moment. Whenever you find some minutes, I leave you with my personal favorite short story of him ‘The Last Question’ https://www.physics.princeton.edu/ph115/LQ.pdf
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How far should customer service extend? The answer is simple - good customer service meets customers’ expectations, improves satisfaction, and reduces troubleshooting for the future. It’s not only about solving the existing problems, but as well about creating solutions that extend customer service by helping to avoid problems in the future or even predict those that haven’t occurred yet.
Mark, we’re glad to see that you apply the above in your daily work and we’re very happy that you’re a part of the Community, whose one of main goal is to share knowledge and experience that can help in solving users’ problems.
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