Why I decided to join Dynatrace, the leading company that is continuously innovating

After 11 years of having fun working at Neotys, the software vendor providing the load testing solution Neoload, I have decided to leave this company to embark on a new adventure at Dynatrace.

“Why did you decide to make this move?” You may ask. “Especially when you had a brand, an image, a reputation within the Neotys Community?”

Well, I must admit that it wasn’t an easy decision to make.

My decision-making process involved spending a lot of time evaluating all the positive and negative points of leaving a company I was fond of to join a company like Dynatrace.

After a lot of reflection, I came to the conclusion that the most important points that helped me in making this decision were:

- Being inspired by smart people

- Always being on the forefront of innovation

- Trusting and being proud of the product

So, let’s cover all those points one at a time:

1. Being inspired by smart people

Several years ago, I had the chance to attend my first Dynatrace partner event in Faro, Portugal.

During this event, Bernd Greifeneder (CTO of Dynatrace) introduced the new platform Ruxit and the future of Dynatrace. He also had a session explaining how Dynatrace had successfully implemented DevOps

I was so impressed by the quality of the content, the way of bringing the audience into his stories. I told myself: wow, Dynatrace’s CTO is clearly a visionary.

I thought that all Dynatracers were lucky to collaborate with him. Because he will breathe innovation in the company, and continuously rethink and redesign the platform to be able to answers the market’s demands.

Like most Dynatrace users, I also had the chance to be part of the annual physical conference Perform , that is presented and moderated by Dave Andersson. Every year, Dave always found a funny and crazy way to come on stage and to turn this conference into one of the first-class tech conferences of the world.

My experience at Perform had clearly established Dynatrace has a one of most creative companies in the tech industry in my mind.

And being a geek, of course, I’m looking for innovation …. But a culture of having fun is also important to me.

Lastly, I followed all the work of Andreas Grabner. I have always been impressed by the quality of his blogs, presentations. He was basically everywhere! One Day in a US conference, the next day in Australia.

When I became a technical evangelist, I clearly wanted to deliver as good content as Andreas. I always asked myself: how is he able to deliver so much?

Over the years I met Andi in person and he became a friend. Now we are also colleagues.

In our industry, we all want to work with leaders, and Dynatrace is clearly the good place to find the right mentor for you.

2. Being at the forefront of innovation

The tech industry moves fast. There are new solutions, frameworks, protocols, architecture concepts appearing almost every week. Following innovation can be a challenge, but it is especially challenging to identify which of the new technologies will be adopted and utilized by the market.

Since I was a kid, I have always loved to explore new things. Over the years, I started seeing technology as a Lego block. For those who know me …You already know that I have a lot of fun building things with Lego blocks 😉.

History has also always been an area of interest for me because it helps you understand why things are currently working in certain way. History allows you to understand the problems we are currently facing and why most decisions are made.

But, when it comes to technology, although I like to understand the background on how things have changed over the years, the reason of a technical limitation…etc., I clearly don’t want to work on technologies that are deprecated.

For me, Dynatrace is the place where I am able to:

• Work with the technology of tomorrow.
• Play with and share my buildings blocks with our community.

To stay the leader of the Observability market, Dynatrace needs to invest significantly in researching all the latest technology in order to provide a support to collect data and provide value. I would recommend all the engineers addicted to innovation to join the DynAdventure

3. Proud of the solution

In 2005 I was in charge of the Performance Center of Excellence at one of the biggest European insurance companies. We were using at that time the Mercury/HP suite including the legacy Loadrunner, performance Center, SiteScope and HP Diagnostics.

Every time we were using HP Diagnostics for our tests, we had to deal with a lot of configuration to properly instrument the application. And we were having lots of challenges due to the consumption of HP diagnostics agents. So, we naturally explored new solutions and …we came across Dynatrace. We were impressed by the capacity of the solution compared to our experience with HP Diagnostics. From that moment on, I started to follow all the news from Dynatrace: Their growth, their new features, their blogs …. etc.

In my previous position, I had to work with technology partners to identify Integrations use cases between NeoLoad and other solutions of the market. With my role, I had the chance to explore and dig in many platforms of the market. I had also the opportunity to build the integration with Dynatrace, NewRelic, Appdynamics, Splunk followed the work with Instana…etc

Dynatrace was clearly the platform that was bringing the most value to the user. It was basically magic to run a test and let Dynatrace Davis AI point out the bottleneck of the application — I was impressed.

You should have seen my face the first time I saw problems identified by Dynatrace!

Dynatrace had the technology and the API to make it work smoothly and successfully. OMG I was so excited to see the results!

Even before joining Dynatrace I was clearly a fan of the technical capacity of the product. And now I have the opportunity to contribute, by drawing more fans to this platform! (As soon as I finish my onboarding journey 😉).

Having worked as a Performance engineer for more than 15 years …. You could clearly be asking yourself what my role within the leader of the Observability market would be.

Well…as mentioned, I was seeking for innovation and if we look around us there is one technology heavily used by any company embarking on a digital transformation journey: Kubernetes.

So I will be the Cloud Native Advocate for Dynatrace focusing on any technology running in a Kubernetes Cluster and I will also collaborate closely with our strategic partner: Google.

In order to help practitioners, I will soon start creating video content that will help our community to instrument, collect, observe a given framework, platform or technology, and eventually blog posts for our Dynatrace Engineering blog.

As my first step in the cloud native world, I presented with Andreas Grabner a Performance Clinic on 9th of June 2021. Watch it here: K8s monitoring at Scale with Prometheus and Dynatrace

Stay tuned for more stories coming from me in the future!

Why I decided to join Dynatrace, the leading company that is continuously innovating was originally published in Dynatrace Engineering on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.