[Member Spotlight] Wael Mohamed Ahmed Abdelwahab, IT Monitoring team Head

[Ryan.Paredez]

Welcome to the Community Member Spotlight series. In this edition, @Wael.Abdelwahab, Deputy General Manager - Systems and Service Monitoring, shares his perspective, tips, use cases, and more…  

— Ryan Paredez, Cisco AppDynamics Community Manager

In this post 

• Your work 
• Working with AppD products 
• Keeping up with the evolving technical landscape 
• Life after-hours 
• Parting insights 

Wael Mohamed Ahmed Abdelwahab, Deputy General Manager- Systems and Service Monitoring

 

Your work 

Could you give us a picture of 'a day in the life'? 

I manage the IT monitoring team (IT NOC) which works 24x7 in shifts. Usually, I check with the previous shift to see if any issues occurred during the night shift.

During the day, we have a couple of dashboards, one based on AppDynamics which shows the health of our critical Applications, the other dashboard is a collection of other applications (network, server, URL monitoring from other vendors)

My team manages any incidents as they occur and notifications are sent to service owners. We’ll follow major incidents until resolved.

How did you get involved with this work? 

I was working in CA tech as a partner in Egypt for 18 years. I worked in CA network management, security, and application performance (either implementation or support ) then I moved to my current role for 4 years now (which I was supporting before)

What has fed your interest in your field? 

I love troubleshooting and issues analysis, so the monitoring center gives me and my team the ability to trace and report issues that affect IT and the business.

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Working with AppD Products 

What first brought you to the AppD community? 

I used to search in communities looking for helpful content as I was active in my previous work (CA Inc. then Broadcom ). I know that experience from other members' knowledge and issues is a great help.

Plus I like helping others when I can; as I have been working in support for a long time.

Can you tell us about a positive experience you’ve had with the community? 

The AppDynmaics community has a very simple user experience, which makes it easy to use and read content. The moderators and AppD engineers are always around to reply and help out.

How do you use AppD in your role? 

My team uses it and depends on it to monitor the performance, and health, and find the root cause of issues in our applications. We usually help the DBA team to quickly identify the SQL query responsible for any high DB utilization as we monitor the Application and its DB.

What are your top 2 AppDynamics hot tips? 

Health rules should be tuned and modified as time goes on. As long as changes happen in your environment, health rules and thresholds will change too. So be sure to keep adapting those. 

Using a mix of dynamic and static thresholds will give you strong observability of your environment.

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How do you keep up with the evolving technical environment? 

What’s your best way of keeping up with industry news? 

I like to use LinkedIn and catch up with the general news.

What have you learned in the past year that you wish you had known when you started your career? 

I wish I did more academic studies (this wasn’t an issue with my past roles), but this would help me progress my career path going forward.

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What about life after-hours? 

What are some of your favorite things to experience outside of work? 

Family, reading, football (I mean soccer not American football, don't be confused by the two ), and documentary channels

How—or where—do you find inspiration? 

I'm a huge fan of TEDx and reading. I recently finished and enjoyed the "Grisha" series or "Grishaverse” by Leigh Bardugo. I'm currently reading "OReilly’s Observability Engineering."

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Parting insights 

What advice would you give someone who is up and coming in your field? 

It is about knowledge. You should always keep pushing yourself to learn and grow. Don't ever stop exploring new technologies, even if they're not directly related to your job.

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