How to coach Dynatrace to a new junior colleague (Plan for the first 3 months)

[marina_pollehn]

So far, I was allowed to coach two junior colleagues on the job.

Ever realized, that on the first day you kinda want to show them everything but a lot of things might really go a step too far? On the other hand, you don't want them to sit around and not work on any project. Sooo...what can they start with? Here are my ideas which worked well for coaching my junior colleague the first 3 months (assuming they work with Dynatrace full-time). I added the detailed information in the brackets because in all honesty....you can make topics like Synthetics and Naming Rules as crazy as you want.

(Pre)Sales Foundation, Dynatrace Foundation

- Partner Specialist Training (incl. DT certificate) *
- Core Partner Training (incl. DT certificate) **
- Complete Getting Started in Dynatrace***

Synthetics

-Standard Dashboard Tile Generation incl. key requests and key user actions
-Standard Dashboard Functionalities (set Timeframe, Management Zone, tag dashboards)
-Edit Data Explorer Tiles with thresholds and visuals (basic metrics, can used pre-made tiles)

Integration & Problem Notification

-Alerting Profiles Creation (based on tags/management zone)
-Problem Notifications (E-Mail & MSTeams with Webhook)

Applications/RUM

-User Action Naming Rules (no RegEx)
-Application Detection Rules (1 app creation)
-Enable RUM and use cost & traffic control
-Mark key user action
-Understand Apdex calculation
-Adjust Key user action anomaly detection

Configurations & Dynatrace Managed

-Changing Monitoring Modes of Hosts (infra-only, full-stack)
-Add users and user groups

Global Settings

-Add and remove manual tags
-Add automatic tags in best-practice (noRegEx)
-Create Management Zone based on tags
-Add maintenance windows
-Service naming (no RegEx)
-Host Naming (no RegEx)

Service Settings

-Adjust Service Anomaly Detection
-Adjust Key Request Anomaly Detection

* Training can be found here: Partner Specialist Training | On Demand | Dynatrace University

** Training can be found here: Core Partner Training | On Demand | Dynatrace University

*** Training can be found here: https://university.dynatrace.com/ondemand/course/40091?content=overview

Are posts like this interesting to you? Any comments and thoughts?

[SOBE]

This is very interesting !

I did coach few people also and was always asked to make a brief training even for those that do not use Dynatrace daily.

For me it was always oriented, like i have to know on which aspect are you gonna use Dynatrace.

For my colleagues i had to start with administration first and then move to the environment (i'm a Managed user)

cover all the basics and then give them some free time to dicover things ontheir own (that's how i learned)

for other teams for example incident management teams => it was oriented on analyzing problems...etc

and so on...

like you said you can't know everything because Dynatrace really covers a lot of things.

I've been using Dynatrace for 4 years now and i still didn't have the chance to see everything.

i think the plan you presented is very good but it has to go in parallel with real working cases so they can learn in real time.

[marina_pollehn]

The plan is intended for real customer or use case experience 🙂 of course, if the topic does not make sense at the moment, it can also always be done on a demo environment or test environment.

Actually good that you pointed it out that you're a Managed user, I wrote the plan for Managed but maybe there's someone who has one for SaaS or wants to help me alter it for SaaS?

[Abidyaseen]

This is really helpful i have recently finished my Associate certification and want to get things as quickly as possible to get fully involved in tasks 

[marina_pollehn]

So much positive feedback - glad I shared it then. @Abidyaseen great to see that it can also help with self-learning 🙂

[MostafaHussein]

Greate jop and very interesting topic @marina_pollehn,

I'm suggest another approach as the below sequence may be useful for some people who are newly joined to observability platforms:

** the added value when using dynatrace **

** explore what's the applications from Dynatrace perspective **

when you have web application running on some services, technologies, hosts. how dynatrace treat with it to cover the business application end-to-end host > process > server-side service > THE APPLICATION it's like a journey

** how things are detected and data collection happens within dynatrace to enrich our observability platform **

- what are things could be detected out-of-the-box depending on OneAgent

- what are things could be detected and the data is being collected by extensions using OneAgent & ActiveGate.

- what's the other options (log monitoring, manual instrumentation, metric ingestions, custom extensions, etc..)

** what's the data flow within dynatrace **

** observability in dynatrace **

how automated baselining is work, how problems are detected, SLOs, Synthetic Monitors, etc..

I considering the above sprints is a foundation knowledge for adapt their minds to how to dive deeply and explore dynatrace, then we move to hands-on works to get more familiar with the platform and going rapidly through dynatrace architecture, implementation, post configuration, fine-tuning, etc..