Hello Dynatrace Community,
Today we're pleased to introduce one of our DynaMights as the Community Member of the Month for November 2021. Let’s give a huge round of applause to @rastislav_danis who always provides great and to-the-point answers, which helped our Community members a lot. Without further ado, let’s get into the interview with him:
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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 live and work in Bratislava, Slovakia. After my studies of Maths and Physics, I started to work as a meteorology computer enthusiast at Slovak Hydrometeorological Institute. Spent several years analyzing data and creating a bit of code there. We were also web pioneers; I had created the first Institute web pages and a lot of internal dynamic CGI pages in the mid-90s (with almost no JavaScript at that time). A few years later I had moved to the commercial sphere & started my family (a coincidence for obvious reasons). At Tempest, I was a founding member of a team-oriented mainly on monitoring projects for our customers. For many years I and my colleagues had messed with analyzing, configurations, integrations, service modeling. Of course, we spent almost the same amount of time with bug hunting inside enterprise software and keeping stuff running. A lot of new requirements in recent years started to disrupt our traditional monitoring approach. Those new requirements were covered by the functionality of our tools only partially or mostly there was no coverage at all. Some of the missing pieces had been created by my superb colleagues, but that was still not enough. So, I spent a lot of time searching internet resources for new "blood" for our team. My story with Dynatrace started that way.
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
One day in late 2016 I had found an interesting tool, that looks good at first sight. Nice web GUI was only one of its benefits. After trial, I was overwhelmed with its easiness of deployment and started working with data. Combined with a clean and fast GUI I was sold. I wrote to the contact email address on Dynatrace web, got an answer and we began partnering with Dynatrace very quickly. I had checked info about other products under Dynatrace portfolio at that time (AppMon, DC RUM, etc.), but soon discovered that jumping straight into Dynatrace products was a good idea. We started to educate the internal team and soon attracted our first customers to the new product. First PoC wins were based on the discovery of undiscoverable applications issues. Several other customers were sold on the complexity of product outcomes at minimal cost (compared to looking for a needle in an ELK haystack). As Dynatrace constantly keeps us awake with frequent updates and new functionality, we also do our best to forward this information to our customers and prospects. A few days ago, for example, we took part at a big local event for software testers presenting Dynatrace functionality for cloud automation and release testing with Keptn.
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?
A big industry company struggled with performance issues in their 20-years old application. At unspecified times a lock appeared and production stops causing a major loss. A lot of effort was done on their side to prevent the issue. HW was upgraded to maximum capacity, a lot of consultancy time was sold, but the issue still appeared. Coincidence with our first Dynatrace attempts leads to a meeting, where their boss told us that we can try the tool and eventual success could lead to immediate purchase. As the application was one of their most critical ones, without any detailed architectural info, this was quite a challenge. Anyhow my skilled colleague found a potential issue in code, created several custom services and we tried it in a test environment without any visible impact on application functionality. Fingers crossed we headed to production and after several days we discovered enough evidence to back our initial suspicions. This success has been presented to other (world) branches of (then) prospect and of course, it soon became our customer.
What brought you to our Community? What is your best memory of it?
All the time, I had been working at my position, communities were one of my biggest sources of information exchange. Luckily for me and us, the Dynatrace community is fresh and full of people willing to help.
On the other hand, it's good to see that your needs for changed or new functionality are supported by other people.
And how about your life outside IT – what is your biggest passion?
Although I live in the capital city, nearby hills and woods were always my favorite place (mostly for walking/hiking). I like to play football, listen to tons of music, watch movies, play (previously also create) computer games (started at old local computers named PMD-85 and went through ZX Spectrum 48+, Commodore, Amiga 500/1200 up to boring PCs). I have a wife and two grown children, so most of my free time for the past 18 years was spent with family. As children are slowly moving from home, I would have to look for some new interests.
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 consume quite a big number of movies and even more amount of music. Reading books was the domain of my younger years, but I can still find some time to consume a book or two. To pick a bit of my fresh and old music tips: Laura Mvula, Mysie, Stereolab, or all from Latitia Sadier, Avalanches, Jay-Jay Johanson, Prefab Sprout, Lush, Massive Attack. Few of my fav movies: Heat, Jeremiah Johnson, Usual suspects, La grande bellezza, Prisoners, Sicario. I quite enjoyed books from Strugacki brothers, Philip K. Dick, Stanislaw Lem, Michail Bulgakov.
Massive Attack - Unfinished Sympathy
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Thank you for the interview, Rastislav! From Hydrometeorological Institute to cloud automation (so different types of clouds 😉), what a great story to read. Also, as a Polish representative, it’s also so nice to see on your favorite authors' list Stanislaw Lem 😊
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