Hello Chad! Shed some light on your life’s journey.
Many years ago, a customer at the bank where my father worked, invited us to join him in building two desktops from scratch. Little did I know, this project would lay the foundation for my future career. Over the years, we completed similar projects, and my knowledge expanded to fixing digital cameras, Gen 1 iPhones, laptops, and desktops.
At my rural school, we had a traveling IT specialist, Jeff, who visited Tuesdays and Thursdays. On the other days, I found myself handling support tickets and resolving issues while Jeff was at neighboring schools. Towards the end of high school, I attended a trade school, where my skills and professionalism grew significantly.
After high school, I pursued a degree in Criminal Justice and Computer Information Systems in college. Upon graduation, I started my career at the help desk, gradually working my way up and gaining experience in various organizations and industries. One of my key projects in my professional career was onboarding Dynatrace, which rapidly excelled and benefited the entire organization. Even before Dynatrace introduced its security features, our team used the platform to monitor application access and activities. We even expanded Dynatrace to include ‘problematic’ customer devices, collecting logs, events, and data to help PC techs resolve issues.
This is just a glimpse of what we’ve achieved with Dynatrace. If you’re interested in learning more, there are numerous blogs highlighting our accomplishments.
What is your professional background?
Throughout my career, I’ve had the opportunity to work in diverse environments, including gated communities, hospitals, insurance companies, and now at LPL Financial, a Fortune 500 financial firm. As an AVP for Platform Observability, my role involves architecting and designing monitoring strategies for emerging technologies within the organization while also establishing standards and best practices for our toolset.
While all aspects of my job are exciting, I find the most gratification in solving seemingly unsolvable problems. This aspect of my work allows me to unleash my creativity for the benefit of the entire organization. Many of these unique solutions have been shared through Pro Tips Community postings, recorded sessions, and blog posts with Andreas (Andi) Grabner.
How does Dynatrace fit into the picture, and what was the biggest challenge Dynatrace helped you overcome?
Our organization is built on a commitment to the customer, guided by our founding principle: “the firm should work for the advisor, and not the other way around.” This principle drives us to deliver the best financial software to our customers, ensuring we are the partners they deserve. We uphold this commitment by leveraging top-tier tools for Application Performance Management (APM). By closely monitoring user sessions, we ensure our users experience seamless, error-free interactions where actions and loads take milliseconds. If these milliseconds turn into seconds, we proactively engage with development teams to identify the root cause and implement solutions.
Throughout my career, many organizations have claimed that the customer is their ‘north star’ or ‘pillar'. However, it is only now that I have seen an organization truly prioritize customer metrics, and I am most proud of this aspect of our work.
Dynatrace has been instrumental in solving numerous issues, some of which I can’t disclose. However, I can share a unique story from a past employer. Our PC techs were struggling with an employee’s laptop that had been crashing for two weeks. After ensuring we had enough host units to cover the device, we added it to a Host Group called ‘Employee Device’ with a Maintenance Window. We onboarded the host around 10 AM, went to lunch at noon, and upon our return, we found a process crash. Dynatrace had captured and recorded the crash details, revealing that the process had run out of allotted memory. When we presented this to the PC tech, he was initially skeptical, having increased the memory allocation by four times. However, upon checking the config file, he discovered it had reverted to the default allocation. This revelation, captured by Dynatrace, solidified its reputation as a go-to tool for solving the unsolvable.
What makes Dynatrace Community important to you?
"The Dynatrace Community is one of the many aspects that makes the platform so great! "
Like everyone, I joined the Community with questions, seeking answers and education. Although the Community was still in its early stages, I found myself surrounded by a plethora of skilled users eager to share their feedback and expertise. I was also impressed by how active the Project Managers were, always on the lookout for great Product Ideas / RFEs (Requests for Enhancements).
As my journey continued, I found myself becoming one of the people I had admired when I first started. Fast-forward to today, and I am proud to have received my second Member of the Month award, alongside my 2022 Perform Award for ‘Most Valuable Customer Contributor,’ and to be a founding member of the DynaMIghts!
The best advice I can give is: If you don’t find an answer, don’t be afraid to ask for one. I once encountered an issue with zero documentation on the UFO for Managed customers. After asking around extensively, I ultimately compiled a solution and created my own documentation to share with everyone.
Oh, and as a rule of thumb… Make sure you exclude any sensitive data in your images and postings! 😊
Tell us something about you that most people don’t know. What is your biggest joy or passion in life?
If you ask anyone, they will tell you that I live and breathe Dynatrace. While that is absolutely true, my life has changed significantly in the past few years. I am now the proud father of a beautiful 2-year-old, Sophie. My Wife, Julia, and I spend our days outside of work with Sophie, letting her experience all the amazing things this world has to offer. At just 3 months old, Sophie got her first passport and became a world traveler. We flew to Austria, visited family in Slovakia, and vacationed in Cyprus. Watching her explore and enjoy these new experiences has been incredibly rewarding.
My bucket list… well, my recent addition to the list would be:
🔹 the new Dynatrace award that was presented this year at Perform - Advocate of the Year 😉
🔹 and of course, the next time we travel to Slovakia and arrive in Vienna, I really want to make the trip over to Linz and visit the Dynatrace Office!
Other than that, I enjoy spending time with my family, doing home improvement projects, helping others, and spending quality time with my extended family.
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