We all spend a lot of our time solving problems. It doesn’t matter if it is at work or in our personal lives, whatever issues we face, the best approach to tackle them effectively is first to… want to solve them 😉 and after that just to look for the right way and tool that we can use to succeed.
This month, we’re happy to introduce to all of you Jason Ostroski - an Employee Member of the Month for September who works alongside other teams and Dynatrace users to discover customers’ business challenges and create solutions focused on value.
We invite you to read more and get to know @jason_ostroski better!
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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?
My current role within Dynatrace is Principal Solutions Engineer, where I learn about existing and potential customer needs and problems and leverage Dynatrace, our services organization, and our partners to build solutions to those problems. I help spread Dynatrace knowledge, both to Dynatrace employees as a regional expert and to customers through webinars, user groups, and social media. I also get the opportunity to work closely with our R&D organization to learn what’s coming up next, help spread the new feature knowledge with our Solutions Engineers and customers, and provide customer feedback to our R&D organization. My favorite part of my job is when customers get excited about Dynatrace and how it can improve their lives and their organization.
What do you like the most about the Dynatrace platform? What parts of Dynatrace do you use?
Can I say everything? Cause Dynatrace is pretty amazing! What first blew me away with Dynatrace is how easy it is to use compared to traditional APM tools or other observability and monitoring tools. One of my buddies described the OneAgent as “magical” and I must agree with him. I often am helping potential customers quickly, without a lot of planning, and need to get visibility into their apps and infrastructure quickly. With the OneAgent, I don’t need a detailed architecture diagram. I don’t need to talk with 5 different teams to uncover the institutional knowledge of the app. I just need a list of servers or the K8s cluster and someone who has rights to install there. Dynatrace takes it from there.
The coolest new part of Dynatrace is the ability to automatically tie user sessions to traces and logs. If a user is hitting an error, I can see everything: the Session Replay of their experience, each user click, the trace from that action, and the log from that trace. The issue might show as a rage click or error on the front end, a 500 error on the web request, and the root cause on the log message. Tying them all together for quick resolution is a game-changer.
I use the full Dynatrace platform depending on the customer’s needs. Anything from SLOs and Cloud Automation, helping customers make better release decisions and automate the evaluation of releases, to the deep diagnostic features, helping customers fix problems for the next release.
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?
When Log4Shell first hit the news, it was a little hectic for everyone. We all knew it was a critical vulnerability, and we all knew how prevalent Log4J was. There was a high potential of being attacked. It was first published around the holidays when staffing gets light with vacations, and no one wants to spend the holidays remediating vulnerabilities.
One of the customers I work with knew they were vulnerable, but they didn’t know exactly where it was in production, and they didn’t have a good way to track where the developers had remediated it. Luckily, they were already participating in a trial of Dynatrace Application Security, and we were already detecting it on over 700 java instances in production! Throughout the week, we watched the remediation tracking screen in Dynatrace, each day fewer and fewer instances were affected as developers remediated it and redeployed their applications. After the developers declared “done” and work was supposed to have been completed, there were still a handful of vulnerable processes out there! The dev and security teams hopped on a quick call, we showed them exactly where it was still running and they resolved it right on the conference call, validating with Dynatrace. There are a few things I love about this story. One is that Dynatrace helped developers and the security team collaborate. We all quickly hopped on a call and resolved it instead of lengthy email chains, passing reports and tickets back and forth. Another part is that Dynatrace was able to shorten their remediation time significantly. Instead of having to scan in non-prod and cross-reference with what was running in production, Dynatrace showed them exactly where it was running. The last part, no one had to work on it during the holidays.
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
The ability to collaborate with and help customers is what first brought me to the Community. I joined way back before we had Dynatrace ONE and it was the best way for customers that didn’t have dedicated services to get questions answered. I would check on it daily to share my experiences and knowledge. Now it’s grown to so much more than that! There’s still the Q&A, but there are also Product Ideas, Challenges, Tips and Tricks and much more!
Whenever I can help a customer, it becomes my new favorite memory. Getting the “kudos” from a happy customer always makes my day.
What part or parts of Dynatrace Community do you like the most?
The Product Ideas part of the Community has become my favorite recently. The direct communication from customers to R&D is something that’s very special about Dynatrace and its Community. Not many companies get customer feedback directly to the developers and the developers share their roadmap and ideas with customers. This ensures our development teams are partnering with our customers and staying up to date on their technology trends and needs. Customers also get to help shape the future of Dynatrace and that’s pretty awesome!
Why do you think it’s worth being a part of the Dynatrace Community? Why do you contribute to the Community?
The Dynatrace Community extends my network from the customers and Dynatrace employees I work with daily to the entire Dynatrace Community. Every customer, every employee.
I contribute to the Community because we’re all in this together! We all just want perfect user experiences, more reliable applications, faster response times, more secure software, and to innovate faster. Contributing to the Community allows me to help even more Dynatrace users meet their goals.
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
Outside of IT, my biggest passion is being outside! My better half, Jenael, and I have two rescue dogs from Puerto Rico that we hike with frequently.
In the spring, I spend a lot of time hiking to small mountain streams to flyfish for brook trout. In the summer, I spend as much time on the water as possible and wakesurf on the weekends. Jenael loves gardening and growing flowers and I have become the resident flower photographer.
The cooler temps in fall are perfect for mountain biking. I love snowboarding in the winter and scuba diving whenever I can take a vacation somewhere with coral reefs.
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. 😊
I am a huge music fan and have an ever-growing vinyl collection! Before starting my studies in Computer Science, I earned an Associate of Science in Recording Arts. Here’s a few of my favorite albums:
- Jazz Fusion: Weather Report – Heavy Weather. Herbie Hancock – Headhunters. Billy Cobham – Spectrum. Each of these are essential Jazz Fusion albums for me. Sometimes on the funkier size, sometimes more rock, but all of them are classics.
- Grunge & Alt-Rock: Dinosaur Jr – Beyond. Smashing Pumpkins – Siamese Dream. I love fuzzy, warm guitars and both these albums have those!
- Electronic: BT - This Binary Universe. Tycho – Dive. STS9 – Circus. While BT is more known for his trance music, his albums focused on ambient soundscapes, live orchestration, and glitch are my favorite. For bonus cool points, BT has written a lot of music production software that he uses to create his music. STS9’s Circus may be my favorite song. It’s uplifting, joyous, and is the perfect long jam to put on right before dropping in snowboarding.
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It’s not always easy to solve problems to meet customers’ needs, but it’s possible.
There never was a higher value in the business than the value of happy customers who appreciate your efforts and see that you really want to help them succeed by being a part of achieving their objectives.
It puts a smile on our faces, Jason, that you see so much value in being a part of the Dynatrace Community that supports you in gathering feedback from customers and allows you to extend your network of Dynatrace employees with who you collaborate.
As quoting you “we’re all in this together” let’s continue building strong partnerships using Community. Looking for a win-win situation always pays off so with other Community members we’re happy to support you along the way to make a better product for all Dynatrace customers.
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