Hello Yann! Shed some light on your life’s journey.
Looking back, I sometimes feel like I’ve already lived two lives: I spent my childhood growing up in France, Brittany in the Finistère area: during the summer holidays, I saw the untainted nature, felt the cold water of the ocean, free to roam in the forest and felt the love of my huge French family! My adulthood was spent in Italy, Rome, where I completed my studies, built important friendships, love stories, and where the city itself shapes your ideas.
In Rome, I cultivated a strong bond with my Italian grandmother: she was a teacher, graduated in philosophy. She read me books, making me riddles all the time, telling me stories of her father, and her life, when Fascism was a thing, and how she opposed the idea. She was light-years ahead of her times.
I am the second of two children and always felt loved by my parents. They taught me how to make my own decisions and take the responsibility for them. That is why, years ago, I decided to leave my studies in Statistics and jump into the unknown by introducing myself to the CISCO CCNA studies.
I was always attracted to the idea of gathering more knowledge and admired people who knew far more than the average. In the end, this is who I want to be: a nice person that knows quite a lot of things, useful things, mostly in depth so that I don't reason superficially and can speak the truth. Otherwise, I would degrade my human nature and fail to serve others as I wish.
What is your professional background?
It was 2016. Monitoring and APM happened by chance rather than choice, but I was very lucky (at least I consider myself to be) as the job I got was physically located in a real Datacenter. No cloud shenanigans, you had the metal, you owned it.
I was one of those people in the Service Desk seeing alerts on screen and deciding if the alert was worth escalating or not. As many of us do in any workplace and role, to do THE job well I first learned the People, and then filled the technical gaps during night shifts. The quiet of the night allowed me to gain the knowledge I needed for the following day, and with this rhythm I got promoted. This reminds me: in today’s reality, focus is a privilege.
Jump forward to 2023, I started working in Coca Cola Hellenic with my latest role being Platform Architect: I take care of the monitoring platform 360°: from license management and in-depth configurations to architectural and integration choices. I am supported by a strong internal team and an excellent manager. I like them very much: we orchestrate, manage, configure the platform, and distribute it as a service among internal teams and external consultants. Overall, CCH is a challenging and worthwhile environment and I do my best to support everyone outside and inside my team.
How does Dynatrace fit into the picture, and what was the biggest challenge Dynatrace helped you overcome?
Now you might wonder, which monitoring platform are you talking about? Well of course Dynatrace 3rd Gen SaaS!
In early 2023, my manager enrolled me to support him in scoping an all-around solution for the fragmented monitoring scenario Coca Cola Hellenic was inheriting after outsourcing most of the monitoring services: Nagios Core, Nagios XI, Grafana and other few tools here and there.
We were not particularly interested in capabilities that most platforms provide today with some level of approximation, such as basic infra monitoring. If you ask around, most people will understand or will offer monitoring such as “we monitor the server” and that’s it. We were looking for more, especially something getting us valuable insights from both SAP Cloud and especially ABAP stack.
I could have jumped to conclusion immediately and influenced our choice toward Dynatrace, since I already had experience with it. However, we conducted a serious evaluation of both App Dynamics and Dynatrace as those were the most prominent solutions with some degree of SAP ABAP technology coverage. Turns out the combination of Dynatrace + Power Connect for SAP coverage was a real winner.
When you’ve worked in monitoring long enough, you know that once a POC is defined, a new requirement is always waiting just around the corner, so it is really important to adopt a platform and/or a combination of tools not limited to the initial scope.
Today Power Connect enables us to siphon any kind of data from a SAP system. It is a powerful and well-documented tool that unlocks critical monitoring capabilities for us. Moreover, the team behind Power Connect has an impressive level of SAP expertise; the collected data is forwarded as logs to Dynatrace and for our top tier use cases (tracking Contact Replication, Order Submit, etc,..) we make heavy use of Power Connect extractors, OpenPipeline, DQL and early adopting Lookups in the hope that this will soon be GA.
We were one of the early adopters of the combined solution Dynatrace + Power Connect and according to the feedback I received so far, we work on the edge of what is possible on Dynatrace.
Far away are the days when OneAgent was our primary source of data, but I must admit, this journey into SAP and the different strategies of monitoring it brought me to a whole new level of understanding, enriching both me and the team I am in.
What makes Dynatrace Community important to you?
There’s always a moment when you’re a newcomer, and a moment when you start becoming the expert you aspire to be. The community is the best place to begin when you’re out of ideas on how to approach the monitoring puzzle game; you’ll almost always find someone who can point you in the right direction.
Coming from Dynatrace Managed, when Dynatrace 3rd Gen was introduced, I felt that familiar discomfort - the feeling that you’re missing an important piece of knowledge. But through the community, I found valuable input from others who were in the same position, people who had to relearn or start from scratch with the new capabilities.
With my current SAP use case, I find myself relying more on DQL. And when things become overwhelmingly complex - when I can only partially conceptualize the solution to my problem - I don’t turn to ChatGPT or Claude.
I go to the Dynatrace Community, where I know skilled professionals will engage and help move the conversation forward (yes, thank you, @krzysztof_hoja but also many of you out there).
Let me be even clearer about how important the community is in this context: when I evaluated Dynatrace as a potential solution for Coca-Cola Hellenic, I also assessed the communities of competing platforms.
"If your goal is to enable an in-house adoption model for your monitoring services, the strength of the community becomes one of the critical factors - new engineers can rely heavily on the knowledge already shared."
In this regard, the Dynatrace Community is clearly active, responsive, and demonstrates a high level of maturity and expertise. This is why, from time to time, I say to my team: “Post this question to the community!” without any hesitation.
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
Since my last Community Member of the Month nomination back in 2020, quite a few things have changed 😊
I still enjoy playing guitar when I can, but over time, my focus has naturally shifted. I’ve developed an interest in finance - even Dynatrace plays a role in that journey - and monitoring has evolved from something I worked on into both a full-time role and a real passion.
Like many things, it’s been a trade-off: less sport, more work, but also a deeper investment in what I do every day and feeling more comfortable and less hesitant when I need to assess a complex scenario.
In this last year, I’ve found myself going beyond the purely technical side. I’ve been actively looking for original perspectives, exploring less conventional or “exotic” use cases, and trying to understand the bigger picture.
I’m also getting curious about how and how much organizations of different sizes—small, medium, and large—are investing in monitoring and observability.
When all of this becomes too crowded in my mind, I stop and reflect on how lucky I am: Sofia, the woman of my life, is the biggest source of joy. A few years ago, we moved from Rome to the countryside, just outside it. Today, we live happily surrounded by nature and, from spring to summer, grow our own vegetables.
It was a conscious choice for both of us—we felt the need to reconnect with something we were gradually losing in our increasingly technological lives: our relationship with nature, touching the real things rather than virtual, observing the slow growth of our work rather than having lightning-fast results on screen.
By the way she is into the monitoring and observability field too 😊 and yes when we have dinner we talk about any complex puzzle we had to solve at work.
When I was a child, my grandmother often read to me from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. At the time, I didn’t fully understand how meaningful those stories were or how much they would stay with me. One passage has remained with me over the years as it is also very common to be taught in Public Italian schools. In Dante’s Inferno, Ulysses speaks to his companions and says: “Consider your very inner nature: you were not made to live like brutes, but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
As he speaks these words, Ulysses encourages his companions to journey beyond the Pillars of Hercules, the boundary of the known world at the time. Dante is channeling his own vision of becoming a better self through Ulysses’ actions. This is my everyday memento to honor my life and the life of those who helped me become who I am today.
I hope you can join me in this journey to virtue and knowledge in this community and in every other place where your roots are growing.
What achievement are you most proud of? What's on your bucket list?
Most of my recent achievements are work-related, and I’m particularly proud of a few key integrations.
I successfully implemented a custom integration extracting valuable data from Microsoft Dataverse / Dynamics 365, enabling observability over some hybrid business/technical workstreams.
More recently, in the past six months, I also built a custom integration between Dynatrace and FortiManager. This allowed us to capture and monitor valuable data and metadata that was not available through standard extensions, addressing a critical visibility gap for the company.
Looking forward, I’m continuing to expand these integration capabilities. My current focus is on connecting SAP Advanced Event Mesh to Dynatrace, as well as integrating Infobip to monitor message volumes and delivery status more effectively. I wish I had better developer skills to leverage Dynatrace app engine to its full potential, but this would also require me to stay in a completely different role 😃 Maybe I can consider night shift again?
Meanwhile, for sure, this summer I will grow tasty tomatoes along with Sofia! This will be an achievement as well!
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