Some paths are twisted and thorny, dark, and unpredictable. Those paths you walk with your hands in front of you, testing every step before putting your foot down. Others are straight, well-lit, with a goal destination clear ahead up on a hill. The second type is not always easier to walk, though, as such paths often require a different kind of courage, the courage to leave the shadows and go toward your dream 🚀
@Pierre_L‘s story is one of such kind, of always knowing what is that you want, and finding courage to go for it.
We invite you to read the article and learn more about him and his journey!
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1. Can you share some details about your past? What is your story, and how it happened that you decided to work in the IT / APM area?
I grew up in Normandy, France, where I remember spending my time at the beach in summertime and in front of my computer the rest of the year. I was very intrigued by how a computer works, so I loved tinkering with hardware and software, not always with success 😊
When asked the famous question “What do you want to study/do as a job”, I remember answering “I like computers,” and this is when serious things started.
After graduating in Computer Science, I moved to Paris for work, and I started working in the performance area with NPM/APM products. I was working in a small company of ten people, and, when I look back, I realise just how lucky I was with no experience to work for almost 20 different clients in 5 years, all big companies in France.
I learned a lot of things, loved my job, met and worked with a lot of nice people, but one thing was missing - I always wanted to be my own boss. And after 5 years, I decided to build my own company.
Guillaume (@gbaudart) and I have known each other since 2009, since we were in our last years in university. Even though after graduation we both took different professional paths, we still kept our friendship. We learnt different and various pro skills but indeed complementary, so, few months after I started my business, it made sense to join our competencies in the partnership. Working together and sharing both personal and professional links, enforce or friendship stronger than ever.
2. Can you tell us a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work, and what do you do in your job? And how does Dynatrace fit into the picture?
I’ve been running my own company for more than 6 years now, helping customers in their observability journey. My actual position is Observability consultant, and for more than one year I’ve been working as a contractor for Christian Dior Couture. My main task is managing Dynatrace as an application owner of the solution, deploying, configuring, analysing, and helping users in their daily usage.
Retail is a very interesting and challenging domain, specifically for luxury brands, which are customer-oriented and trying to offer the best and unique experiences for their clients. Online or in-person experiences are digitally dependent so it should be as smooth as possible, and that’s where best-class products such as Dynatrace are helping a lot.
3. What was the biggest challenge Dynatrace helped you to overcome?
One of the biggest problems Dynatrace helped to resolve was a few years ago, for a client, a top critical custom application, that suffered from big slowness randomly in the week. All teams working in silos were on the frontline trying to find the root cause with their own set of tools, but the application was so complex with multiple internal layers, a lot of servers, and dependencies with other applications.
Dynatrace was deployed on each layer of the application. During the next slowness, the root cause was identified in minutes, by looking at Smartscape, Service flow, and backtrace. And the deep analysis performed post-mortem by the dev team helped to fix the issue just a week later!
That was one of the first experiences I had with Dynatrace. I found that very impressive, and I was not the only one, so we started building dashboards with KPIs for live monitoring to help all teams have more visibility.
4. What brought you to our Community? What made you stay? What best advice can you give someone who just started using Community?
The first time I checked the Community was when I needed a concrete use case on how to implement a specific feature. Now, every time a new topic comes to me, and I can’t find anything in the documentation, a few keywords in the Community search bar, and I almost always find related topics.
For newcomers in the Community, my main advice is there are no silly questions, so don’t hesitate, ask the Community (and vote for the features you’re missing 😊).
Dynatrace is such a complete product that you can't know everything, so relying on the Community is very useful 😉
5. Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
My main passions are travel and sports, mainly football and the NBA. And, as a good French, I love food and wines, so dining in the finest restaurants and tasting first-class wines with family and friends is one of my favorites, too 😉
6. What’s one thing on your bucket list? Your dream?
I have so many things on my bucket list but one related to my travelling passion is to see all the Seven Wonders of the World. I already visited the Colosseum and Christ the Redeemer. The next one should be the Pyramid of Giza, but I hope to see all of them one day 🤩
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Thank you for sharing your story with us, @Pierre_L! We wish you years of exciting challenges overcame with the help of Dynatrace ahead, lots of good food and wines, and, of course, to tick off ✅ all the Seven Wonders off your bucket list, and soon 😉 And keep up the Community "work"!
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