Hello Dynatrace Community!
Welcome in the sunny May. We are starting a new month with the introduction of the new Community Member of the Month. @Akshay S. – congratulations for winning this award and thank you for being here!
Akshay has been active on our forum for many years. First, as a NAM user, and now, under a new company, as a Dynatrace passionate. Let’s all hear the story of how he’s become the part of our Community in this interview.
Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?
I'm currently working with Cognizant Technology Solutions India, Pune as Technology Specialist with more than 9 years of experience in APM implementation. Throughout my tenure, I performed various roles from support & implementation engineer, consultant to solution designer. I’ve worked on APM implementations where we used DC RUM and AppMon for monitoring application performance for 35+ internal applications with various technologies like Java, .NET and PHP. As a part of APM commitment, I have also conducted POC's (proof of concept) and APM enablement sessions and user adoption training.
With current work, we provide APM solutions to banking, financial, and automobile customers. Although we work on other APM tools as well, we strongly recommend Dynatrace to the customers because of its ease of deployment and capabilities to monitor the application end to end. I also believe, Dynatrace is the solution that stands out on top in the APM category. I would love to rate it 10/10. 
What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?
I worked on several APM tool but started playing with Dynatrace AppMon and DC RUM in 2015 and since then I'm in love with Dynatrace :).
When I came across the Dynatrace first time, it was like magic for me. The software revealing a backend calls, methods in just a single click. Showing full user visits, what they did, where they clicked - everything was just amazing.
I remember it very clearly, how I was showing to my friends/colleagues what they did today on the application via use visits 😉
In this new Dynatrace platform (OneAgent) the way developers incorporated everything under one hood is really cool. User Experience, Code level monitoring of applications, infrastructure monitoring, all in one panel. One feature I like the most is Dynatrace synthetic. The recorder is here, you can watch the script run here (playback) and configure it for monitoring... It’s all under one UI and this is awesome.
Have you ever had any interesting use case for the Dynatrace product that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?
Well, there are so many, that they can't fit in one paragraph 🙂
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Ease of deployment: More than 200 servers/hosts and their configuration was a nightmare but the Dynatrace along with Ansible or puppet made a deployment super-fast and very easy. This one of the strong points of Dynatrace which stands out of all others. Now even 1000 servers will not make us worry about the deployment timelines.
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Synthetic: Customer had more than 600 synthetic monitors to implement. For monitoring URL or API which doesn't need to see if the page is visually complete or not and availability is the only concern, the option provided to choose HTTP monitor is very well appreciated by the customer which of course saves a cost of the license.
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Root Cause: There was a use case where one of the application JVM was taking a long time for garbage collection. After AI detected the root-cause, we’ve checked concern service and dig into code-level details to see what method was causing a huge garbage collection. That was one of the key findings to improve the performance of application.
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New Support Chat: One of the important features, I would say. This helps the end-user to learn the tool by themselves and ask questions through the D1 support chat feature. The application support team for which the Dynatrace OneAgent is deployed think this feature is really cool. Their question cleared and resolved itself via chat support.
What brought you to our Community? What is your best memory about it?
Lots of my questions were answered perfectly and correctly – and this also included some basic questions ;). It’s a really active and responsive community I would say.
I think it is the best way to find answers is to first reach to Community, before raising a concern to Dynatrace support. Sometimes, issues or challenges may be solved quickly through the Community because they are already known.
I urge people to participate more in the community forum, share their ideas, views and knowledge to make the Dynatrace world bigger and better.
And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?
I'm a technology geek. I have a strong love for cars and bikes and their mechanics. Past few years, I'm keeping myself updated with electric cars and their technologies which are considered a future of commute.
My biggest passion is to drive Rimac Concept One and Tesla S P100D in ludicrous mode. Well, both are electric cars 🙂
I love to watch movies on my home theatre with my wife and parents and even on mobile if my TV is completely booked ;). I also love to explore new places like hills or forts.
If I have time beside this, you can mainly find me fixing things ranking from my nephew's toys, electronic home appliances, mobile phones to my own car, bike and scooter. Well, it's good to say, I can repair almost anything 😉
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 🙂
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Favorite Movies - Joker, Avenger Series, 3Idiots and movies that pass some message to society like Swades, OMG, Rang De Basanti, Tare Zameen Par
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Favorite Song - Alan Walkers Faded, Alone, Darkside and lots of Hindi and Marathi songs
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Favorite Web series - Prison Break, Sacred Games, Asur, Delhi Crime
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Book - Not that much into reading but I’ve read Elon Musk's “HOW THE BILLIONAIRE CEO OF SPACEX AND TESLA IS SHAPING OUR FUTURE” by Ashlee Vance
It’s always great to read about how Dynatrace can make work for others much easier and more enjoyable – thank you for these examples and your contributions in the forum Akshay!
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