Hello Dynatrace Community,
2021 is slowly coming to an end but @dannemca – the Community Member of the Month for December is speeding up. He actively takes part in helping others, developing the Community, and developing himself along the way. He believes that Community is a great place for looking for information, sharing, growing, and meeting other people of course.
Let's meet Danne Aguiar closer and congratulate him for winning this award.
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Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?
I have started my career in 2010 as a Monitoring Specialist, at IBM, supporting the off-hours shift with IBM Tivoli Monitoring v6. Dealing with Infrastructure monitoring for OS, Database, and Middleware products. Then I become the shift leader of the Off-hours team, managing (technically) a small team of 16 people, supporting various clients around the globe.
In 2015 I left this position to become a Subject Matter Expert (SME) supporting dedicated domestic clients in Brazil only, when I started to engage with APM Monitoring, since one of the clients was a big retail company, with a great demand during the sales season, such as Black Friday.
I have then started to work with APM tools from different vendors such as Broadcom (CA), AppDynamics, IBM APM, focusing on the client experience, Golden Signals, and Observability with dashboards (Grafana, Kibana).
Since 2020 I am focused on SRE, cloud platforms, acquiring certifications from different products, such as IBM Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and professionals/career certifications, such as IT Specialist (L2) and Site Reliability Engineer (L1) from IBM.
I am now on Kyndryl, supporting IBM as a vendor.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
My first contact with Dynatrace was in 2020 when I was proposed to switch positions inside IBM, from one team to another, and one of the required skills was Dynatrace knowledge. I have never worked with Dynatrace before, just knew it was an APM tool, and just that. I have then started to study alone, following the university path and doing trials (yes, plural, I have done at least two during this time and still doing tests sometimes, lol). I did use cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, IBM) to create VMs, K8S clusters, and using demo apps such as EasyTravel and others I have created with Apache PHP, PostgreSQL, just to study and practice. After one month, I got the Associate Certification, the first one from both teams (the current one, and the new one) to acquire this certification, and just like this, I got the position.
Since then I am working dedicated with Dynatrace product to provide Application Performance Monitoring to our internal clients, from different technologies. Got my Professional Certification on Feb/21 and Since July/21 I am acting as Dynatrace Product Owner, leading our Engineers on client support, acting as a single point of contact between our contract and Dynatrace Support team. always learning and teaching to keep me updated, seeking the Master Certification.
Have you ever had any interesting use case for the Dynatrace platform that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
One of our clients decides to use the Observability that Dynatrace provides to save money on their deployment. They are using a hosting service (Openshift) that bills based on Memory utilization. So I did propose to use the Dynatrace metrics to learn when and how can we save this money. Using the Metrics from OpenShift Workloads, Application FronEnt user peak activity time, and Services Traffic we could track a safe window time when their deployments could be scaled down and others completely shut off, such as Dev and Testing environments during the time Developers team are out of work.
Since their hosting service did not provide an API for remote control of the Deployments scales, only Web Browser control panel, I proposed to use the Synthetic Browser to automate this "On/Off" switch. We have then created the scripted Browser that contains authentication, search navigation, and clicks to handle the deployments scales. And to manage the timings to execute the Synthetics, we are using the Maintenance Window to enable/disable the executions.
The client could save 70% of their bill in the first month. We are now enhancing the solution to create better automation and flexible window time. This case was presented at the first SRE Conference @ IBM on Nov 10 (https://www.ibm.com/events/sre/agenda-day-2/sessions.html#SRE-052)
What brought you to our community? What is your best memory about it?
I was always into communities. It reminds me of the old school of the internet, before Social Media, where we could meet (virtually) people that have the same interest and discuss about it.
I do confess I am still new here, not having enough memories to share, but hoping to acquire some soon. I really love the Challenges, where you can get in touch with the person and not only the technical side of our members.
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
I do love Motorcycles and music. Since I was a kid, I dream about taking a motorcycle and riding the world to watch concerts. Now I have a Harley Davidson Dyna (what a coincidence) 2009, but I had a few others from different sizes. Went on a road trip with my wife and two friends to Chile, a total of 8000 km (5000 miles) in 2015 (diary in Portuguese here: https://www.motonline.com.br/noticia/viajando-pela-argentina-e-chile-1o-e-2o-dia/). And other trips to Brazil, where I live. I am married, father of two (a girl and a boy), and when they allow, I still go for shorts ride.
It would also be great if you could share with us your favorite movie, song, and/or a book. Let other Community members discover something new and interesting to watch/hear/read 🙂
I do like mind blow movies, such as Donie Darko, Shutter Island, Memento, all movies that have a non-obvious end.
For music, I like experimental metal. I am a calm person, but I like angry music. One of my passions of the moment is the project Igorrr, from Gautier Serre (https://youtu.be/UZzYxGZ7Hmc). The "normal" metal/rock is too boring to me. I like when the artist mix different melodies with the aggression of distortion guitars and a heavy rhythm drum.
I am not so into books, I like to read about something I do not know yet, such as financing/investments. Not really into fiction, I let that to movies.
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I can only say that I am really amazed at how much progress Danne did with Dynatrace so far. By self-learning, developing his skills, and actively using Dynatrace Community he helps his company and its clients to save money and time.
Thank you, Danne, for being with us and for your story.
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