Article by Maciej N. · Dec 01, 2020 at 08:28 AM · edited · Dec 01, 2020 at 03:09 PM

Announcing the Community Member of the Month for December 2020!

Hello Community,

2020 is slowly coming to an end and it’s time for the last Community Member of the Month for this year. Let's all congratulate @Julio M., our winner from sunny Brazil! Julio’s answers, questions, and comments are very detailed and full of truly useful information. Thanks to this, he always brings something valuable to the discussion and we couldn’t be happier that he's with us in the Community.

Can you tell a little bit about your professional life? Where do you work and what do you do in your job?

With a Computer Science Major, I began working as a programmer in the early 2000s. I fell in love with the IT career from the beginning. Today, I am a Systems Analyst for the State Justice Department of Parana, in Brazil (https://www.tjpr.jus.br/). In the latest career shift, I moved away from software development towards application infrastructure and operations. This changed my entire perspective about software development, opening a whole new world of other programming languages and tools that help keep applications available to end-users. This includes Dynatrace itself, which has been an important acquisition to help us with that challenge.

What is your story with Dynatrace? Why did you start using our products and for what project?

Our team is mostly responsible for provisioning and maintaining environments that host over 100 applications, most of which are developed in-house by dozens of developers in various teams. Over the last few years, we also managed to migrate most of our infrastructure into containers using Docker, Kubernetes, and a whole lot of custom automation. In practice, that means wide-open gates to continuous integration, faster development, and shorter delivery cycles. It also means more integration with 3rd party solutions. Applications also now get the chance to evolve into a wider range of programming languages, libraries, and frameworks.

In order to keep up with the myriad of issues that spawn in staging and production environments, Dynatrace has become indispensable. Without it, the infrastructure team used to see applications as mysterious black boxes. Dynatrace introspection removes that barrier, making application behavior very transparent. Error detection is fast, intelligent, and configurable. Long gone are the days of skimming through endless log files to find the root cause of a problem.

Have you ever had any interesting use case for Dynatrace product that you found out to be particularly intriguing? Could you tell us about it?

We consistently use Dynatrace to report application runtime errors to developers. But the most relevant benefit is the ability to confidently create reports that pinpoint the root cause of poor performance during intense instability and crisis. When things go wrong for mission-critical applications, it is easy for opinions to speak louder, especially when everyone is trying to guess why things are not working as expected. Dynatrace has given our team the ability to create reliable reports based on actual metrics. Those are important tools to validate statements about what can be done immediately in the application source code to resolve certain issues. This dramatically reduced friction among developers and infrastructure teams. It has proven to be difficult to argue against real-time detailed metrics straight from the environment where the application is running.

The new version of Dynatrace, with advanced problem reporting powered by Artificial Intelligence, is a lot cleaner and focused on the root cause of detected problems.

What brought you to our Community? What is your best memory about it?

Feedback is gathered and considered for future releases. As a last resource, the official customer support is always ready and quick to provide patches, improvements, and explanations about how Dynatrace works.

And how about your life outside the IT – what is your biggest passion?

My biggest passion is still IT. Discovering new tools, new platforms, and architectures. Outside of IT, I'm mostly about family. Main hobbies include movies and TV. Streaming on demand has been a reality for some time now. My favorite TV series are Breaking Bad (2008), Mr. Robot (2015), and Dark (2017). Besides those, there are so many options today it's actually difficult to keep up.

I am always amazed at how many different use cases and businesses that Dynatrace can be used in, this is the first time I’m hearing about the Justice Department – that sounds incredible! Thank you, Julio, for being with us and for your story.