Cisco AppDynamics Community

Claudia.Landivar · ‎05-04-2021

Welcome to our Community Spotlight series! In this edition, Gaurav Gupta, an Engineering Manager in the financial services sector, shares his career trajectory, knowledge sharing inspirations, and more.

— Claudia Landivar, Community Manager & Editor

A day in the life of Gaurav.Gupta

Can you give us a picture of “a day in the life”? What do you do at your job?

I am an Engineering Manager, responsible for Monitoring (creating Alerts), Operations (handling Alerts), and managing the India unit. My day is divided into three major blocks:

taking care of the India monitoring team
taking care of day-to-day admin activities for the India unit and stakeholders
interacting with my Global operation team.

Typically, my role is to develop a technical roadmap, provide technical coaching/guidance for my product, and empower other product teams.

How did you get involved with this work?

I started my career as an Oracle DBA and Unix system admin. During that time, I developed several shell scripts to monitor the health of my databases and servers. Later on, I moved to project, program, portfolio, and delivery management. In early 2017, I moved to a role to define and implement operation and monitoring practices/solutions into my entire domain, which has a presence in around 11 countries.

What has fed your interest in your work?

Instant gratification! – You can see results immediately and have the ability to quickly solve people's problems to create a WOW factor. The entire APM suite brings a lot of business value and is useful for various roles like Product Owner, Engineering Manager, Developers, Tester, etc.

Why participate in Community?

What first brought you to the AppD community?

While preparing for AppDynamics Performance Analyst Certification, I was trying various new features and capabilities. I got stuck on one of the new reporting features and I sought out help in the Community at that time. I was amazed to see the speed of response and resolution.

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

The incident above gave me the idea to set up a similar type of forum in my organization. Immediately after it, I set up a Community of Practice in my organization to share best practices, learning with others, and currently, we have more than 150 people in that group.

How do you use AppD in your role?

AppD is our main monitoring solution. We have explored and implemented all its features to provide complete visibility to the product team. We helped the team in learning and implementing AppD solutions for their various products.

What are your top 2 AppDynamics hot tips?

People see it and then believe it. Use this to initiate a showcase engagement with AppD Professional Services so you can demonstrate all the features of one mission-critical application to your key stakeholders and leadership. This will help you to accelerate the adoption of monitoring.

My second recommendation is to leverage your investment. In my organization, we have a license for the majority of (AppDynamics) features— however, we have not implemented most of them. Try out all those features, and work with your business partners to identify and address their business problems using them.

For example, we implemented Log Analytic to provide a single platform for our product team to refer to multiple logs. This has helped reduce their resolution time from 15 minutes to less than a minute.

How do you use AppD day-to-day?

We have developed many use cases. EUM Implementation has helped the Global (different time zone) team to provide very efficient support without interacting with end-users as they can regenerate the customer journey.

We have also implemented self-healing to resolve incidents automatically. This has helped us not only in reducing MTTR but also in reducing support efforts.

Keeping up with technology trends

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

Webinars, conferences, Gartner Reports and Linkedin are my major sources for up-to-date information.

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

Digital Transformation has helped me start focusing more on values: why instead of what/how. This has helped me tremendously in my personal and professional life as I was able to better prioritize my work and time.

Life After Hours

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

I have three daughters, Pakhi, Lavanya, and Aradhya, and I love to play and travel with them.

How—or where—do you find inspiration?

I have read a book named “Goals” by Brian Tracy. The main objective of this book is “How to Get Everything You Want — Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible”. Whenever I feel down, I refer to this book and come up with a new action plan to remotivate myself.

Is there anyone you’d like to shout out or elevate?

I would like to thank my wife Deepti, mentors Sudhakar and Manish, leadership (especially Phil and Tom), and my current and past team members for providing their full support and encouragement.

Insights to Share

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

Growth Mindset: Please try to explore new features, and focus on resolving more and more business problems.