PurePerformance - Perform 2020: Cloud Modernization with Robert Sirchia of Magenic

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Leveraging APM to enable smarter cloud migration

Coming to you from Dynatrace Perform in Las Vegas, it's Pure Performance. Hey everybody, welcome back to yet another awesome interview with one of our great partners here at Diner Trace Perform. Robert. Hi. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Robert, you're with Magenic.

I am. And you know Paul Grisafi. I do know Paul. We're going to spend the next 35 minutes just talking about Paul. That's your cousin. Yeah, we're related by haircut. That's not fair. That is not fair. That's not right. Yeah, we're related by haircut. That's not fair. That is not fair.

That's not right. But welcome. Thank you. Has Magenic been a partner here at Perform before? Is this your first Perform? No, this is my second. Second. We were here last year.

Cool. We got a full taste of what Dynatrace can do last year, and it was amazing. Overly technical last year. It blew a lot of our minds. And then this year, it, you know, outcome driven. Cool. So the change, the tone of what we heard this year versus what we heard last year is more focused on results, businesses, and value.

And that, for us, just means a lot more. I mean, the technology is great, but we've got to translate that to our customers and what it seems like. Oh, hi. This is Brian Wilson. Brian Wilson joins us. Hi, Brian. I'm just sliding into an open spot.

Yeah. So, Robert, if you could, just a little bit, tell us a little bit about Magenic for folks that don't know. So we're a professional services company. We're a partner of Dynatrace. We've been around for about 25 years. We have seven offices across the United States, and we have an offshore office in Manila, Philippines,

one of my favorite places to go. Really? Cool. Some of the best staff we have is out of our Philippines office. Awesome. And they do everything from QA to DevOps, and they're leading some of the charges right now with some of our certifications around Dynatrace as well. Yeah. Very, very cool. Again, we mentioned other folks we know.

There were some other folks back in the Minneapolis office I knew. Being a Minnesotan myself, I don't often tell people I'm born in the motherland. We can tell by the hair. You can? Yeah. It's very Minnesota. Something about negative 24 Fahrenheit.

Where your hair goes white? Where your hair goes white. I'm like a white walker. I was like Gandalf the Gray, then it became Gandalf the White. Every time I go back to Minnesota, that's where our corporate office is at. I live in Ohio, and I always say it's north of the wall. It's north of the wall because that's how cold it is. Oh, my gosh.

I never really thought about that. But in particular, for your participation here, did you actually have a session talk? I actually had a talk right over there at one of the off-stations. Oh, yeah, the breakout booth. The breakout booth. And we talked about how we leverage Dynatrace in cloud modernization efforts.

So for me, it takes the human out of it, and I like that, so I don't have to talk to, I can talk to less people, get data faster, and how we use, leverage SmartScape and the multi-cloud strategies with the Dynatrace platform to show what it looks like before and after we modernize apps. So if you think about you know customers like cfos and cios they go what am i going to get when i move to the cloud and i have

to show performance increases like i have to have numbers dynatrace gives give me they it gives me those numbers right away yeah and for us that's important so i can say hey your app was crappy here but now it's better and now it can scale in the cloud. So if a second was worth a million dollars and you can show two seconds of improvement. Well, I like to say it's $2 million of improvement, but I can't guarantee that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, you use the word crappy? Yes.

Yeah. It has appy in it. It does. It's the first time it really struck me that your app could be crap. Yeah. It can. But it's not Scottish. It's a crap. It's a crap yeah it can but it's not scottish it's a crap but it means it is not scottish because if it were scottish it wouldn't be crap

what would it be well isn't that the thing from the if it's not scottish it's crap oh sorry mike myers yeah yeah anyway back to technology things um back to the show yeah so maybe share a little bit more about who you're speaking with and where they find jumping and leaping into the cloud. We've heard a lot about the Autonomous Cloud Automation. Sure. What's the Autonomous Cloud ACE stuff? Mm-hmm.

Plus also some AIOps messages that's coming out as well. Is that something that leverages in what you're doing? So this is usually day two. So when we're modernizing applications, when it comes to the no-op pipelines and that AI engine, that's when our developers and our consultants can come in and leverage what that looks like. And we take the, as soon as it's set up and it's going, we take the human element out of it. And we ask our DevOps guys to put their hands up going, like, what do you want me to do now? Because I'm done.

Yeah. I don't need to do anything. This will do it for you, and this will actually do my job now and walk away. And when customers see that, the look on their face is, I don't need to keep you? No. So please don't hire. Like, DevOps engineers, you don't need to hire full-time with Dynatrace. It's like you get started, you let it go, and once it starts it starts running really kind of what are these guys going to do tomorrow yeah or the human the human interaction just

changes in terms of leveraging the information to do other things make other decisions business investment where things need to be shored up i mean not not that that us minion humans we might be removed from the equation one of the the things that when our customers can see what happens when they deploy something and the website is actually non-performance, so the JavaScript errors that are coming through, that's a game changer for a lot of our customers because the front end has never been the love that they get. It's not as easy to monitor and to look at. And when you can put that level of monitoring and that, hey, you deprecated the performance or the user experience on the front end, roll it back. That's amazing for our customers.

And when we tell them that this is what it can do, it's a whole game changer. Now it's not pointing fingers anymore. It's, hey, as a team, let's fix it. Because that's what it is. It's just, as a team, we need to fix this. And it's not your side didn't, our side didn't. So it's not pointing fingers. It's like, hey, there's a problem. Dynatrace rolled that back for us. Let's what it is. It's just as a team, we need to fix this. And it's not your side didn't, our side didn't. So it's not pointing fingers. It's like, hey, there's a problem.

Dynatrace rolled that back for us. Yeah, yeah, cool. I just wanted to ask, when you're moving, when people are doing the cloud migrations and all this, are you working with a lot of lift and shifts or are you trying to focus on cloud native or let's not lift and shift, let's re-architect and make this cloud native as you go in?

We have to sit with our customers and have a conversation of how cloud native you want to be, like how cloud you really want this app to be. So in our application portfolio rationalization or our ACR process, we actually have to have this conversation because if it's a small app that's used once a year

or twice a year, we don't want to rewrite that. Let's get it up there and let it run. But if it's driving 80-90% of your revenue, that's used once a year or twice a year, we don't want to rewrite that. Let's just get it up there and let it run. But if it's driving 80%, 90% of your revenue, that's where we focus, like, on true modernization. And with any cloud journey, you really need to take those baby steps first. So it's lift and shift, and then it's a modernization path as we go forward.

So most companies can't just take that big, let's just rewrite this in the cloud tomorrow. It's too hard. One of the dangers I hear a lot with lift and shift, it's coming out more, it seems, is that people don't realize what they're lifting and shifting. And so once they shift it to the cloud, either it stops working or performance starts tanking, all sorts of problems arise. Yeah, because you're now adding 3,000 to 5,000 miles of network.

And if you have a bias there, you'll kill it. But besides even adding that, sometimes you have dependencies you hadn't realized that were a part of that that weren't connected through. What do you see with all that? And that's one of the reasons why SmartScape, I'm a huge fan of it. We'll come in and I'll say, I need this to run for six months. And they look at me going like we can't get started no i'm gonna get started but i need to see what those month-end um those

month-end jobs are i need to see what those quarterly jobs are i need to see what's a job that's running on a sql server or a sql dba's laptop and you never can go on vacation between the first and second of the month because he's got a job to run those are the ones i need to find and those are where we get burned a lot of is not seeing those things. And like I said, when I come to SmartScape, I just go in there and go like, hmm, you didn't know that was there, did you? You didn't. Well, that's actually your DBA's

laptop. So we're going to have to move the DBA to the AWS cloud, and they're going to just sit in that facility. You know, and some of the other things that we and I try to tell our joint customers is when you run Dynatrace, you actually have a gut check of your actual consumption and your use. And when you get to AWS, you get to Azure or GCP, you get what they tell you your usage is,

and then you have what Dynatrace says it is. And it's not necessarily those same things. When you look at those numbers, you're going, and then I've had conversations with AWS reps going, why is it there's a big difference here. Yeah, they're not transparent at all on their algorithm for how they calculate pricing. And you know what? They get to charge higher prices for poor performing applications.

So if your application doesn't run well and it's not cloud native, if you just threw it into the cloud, they penalize you and charge you more. So either you're going to pay for it in the long run or you're going to pay for it up front. I'd rather you pay for it up front, do it the right way, get it there, and make it perform it. I have a question just about sort of other cloud innovations that are coming, like in the serverless realm. So in Azure, you've got Azure Functions, you've got the Lambda stuff happening in AWS, which are other options. Like once you get to the cloud and it opens the door, do you help people sort of, you know,

here's some things that are candidates to use other new services. Especially with serverless, we look at the actual usage. So when I have the conversation of how much is this used, do we know? Yeah. So when, you know, again, when you look at what Dynatrace can, you know, look at and you can see, you can kind of narrow it down. I look at, well, we're using X amount. What does that translate into AWS?

Now, if we're not using it a lot, then let's look at a function and see if that's a better option. But we want to make sure that we're not putting something out there just because it's a cool toy and I'm writing my resume for my next job because that's usually what happens with a lot of our architects. They want to play with the latest and greatest. But then when they look at the cost, so Dynatrace helps me flesh out what,

it's like, hey, we don't use it often, but it's used like five other places. Let's just put it here, and it's a safe place where we're not going to get killed on billing. One of the examples, Andy Grabner. Have you met Andy ever yet? No, I have not. So when he started first playing with serverless,

he wrote a function, and he realized by looking at Dynatrace how messed up it was because he learned a valuable lesson in serverless functions, started a process that then fired off, I think, five or six in series

sub-functions and the first one had to wait until they were all done to complete. But again, he didn't understand. Never touched it at all. And he was looking at it and he's like, then looking at the billing coming through he's like, this is a lot. And he's like, ah, okay, so if I push these in series or take

this one out of the serverless function and just fire these ones, you know, it can help you just even visually. You can see that it's just a ladder. And you can see it going in series and all. And again, a lot of the times I think people make the same mistake when they just lift and shift or when they make any kind of change, right? Hey, let's throw this as a microservice.

It's really a nanoservice, all doing the same thing, and all we did is add a network layer in between and complicate it anymore. But it's really chatty for some reason. Yeah. But, hey, it's a microservice. No, it's a nanoservice. But people make the same mistakes with serverless. Oh, let's just toss this up

in serverless, right? And there are definite rules and boundaries you need to follow if you're going to put something as a serverless function because otherwise you're just paying for it. And again, it comes down to data.

And I think that was the theme of this year was data. And I think it's how Dynatrace is going is being more data-focused in the next couple years. And if you look at the data that comes out of it,

it helps drive our decisions. And no matter what your cloud is, it's going to drive drive that decision do i want to put it in a serverless or do i want to just keep it as a microservice or i like to call them domain services because you know um but i i think that's what dynatrace gives us a better ability to see i have a question for you sure do you have a disaster story? Maybe not one of your customers, but something you could remember. And then you could win a drone because we can just add this into anyone we interview. I just have a feeling you might. I have a few.

I have a few disaster stories. One of them was with a client that I was working with in engagement. And we had a threading issue and your product line was new to us and the operations team was their tier two support had access to it and you know we wore rooms we came in and that's where my one of my first exposures to what Dynatrace could do they're just like they're like all right I can bring this up in the drill down that we did in there and I'm like wow that's it I go can I get access to this and they're like, all right, I can bring this up in the drill down that we did in there. And I'm like, wow, that's it? I go, can I get access to this?

And they're like, well, you're just a consultant. I'm like, no, I want to see it. That's the first time I actually got to play. So we found out that we had a blocking thread, and we were in production, all hands on deck. I'm remote. And they were like, yeah, we just narrowed it down and said hey this thread is literally sitting yeah it's not the garbage collection's not picking it up and we we knew how to fix it but we just to get to it like the nanosecond site it was right there needle in the haystack so when

we came back and you know i got back into magenic and i had a conversation with our partner manager i go we really need to have a conversation on what this looks like and he goes why i go it saved our lives. Like, it was like, I mean, this was a serious production issue. We were all hands on deck, you know, 2 a.m. Eastern time when I'm up and, you know, glass of whiskey and trying to figure out what this issue is. Dynatrace cut that whiskey short, but it felt good to know what the issue was in seconds. Yeah, and then, of course, you get the soporific effect after it's solved.

It's like, wow, I can go to sleep. I was like, I've got to finish this whiskey and then go to bed. Yeah, and not, you know, I still have to clean up that day at this table. But that was one of my first exposures to, you know, Dynatrace. And when you look at some of your other competitors, you know, they've obviously, from a partnership side, they want to partner with you. And you look at what they offer, I'm like, hmm. And you guys have set a bar so high in this generation where I can't look at you as APM anymore.

You guys are an entire platform. Oh, that's good. Dave Anderson would love to hear you say that. Yeah, you can't look at it. So when you look at it like, oh, I got AppDynamics or something like that, I'm not trying to crap on anybody else's product. You're not allowed to say those words. Oh, sorry.

I didn't say it. We can bleep it out. Bleep it out. Like Richard Pryor on Saturday Night Live. So when you look at their offerings and what the customers come to me like, hey, can you do your app rationalization with this product? I'm like, I can. It's going to be hard, but I mean, sure.

I can bake a cake with no eggs. It's not going to be the same, but sure. Like a vegan egg would be no eggs. Or you could build but sure. Like a vegan egg. It would be no egg. Or you could build a cake. You build a cake. Side note, you ever watch Napoleon Dynamite? I have. So you know the whole line, like, I'll build her a cake?

And everyone laughs at that? Well, we found out from Leandro Melendez here, senior performo, that's how you say it in Mexican or Spanish. You build a cake. Because if you make a cake, it's kind of dirty. It's a little salacious in Espanol to make a cake. Wow. It's to build a cake.

My wife's learning Spanish now. It's like her midlife crisis, and she's learning Spanish, so I'll have to ask her. Leandro can give you some tips on what to say to your wife. Okay. Let's go make a cake. She's here in Vegas this week with me. She's not in the conference hall, but I'll bring her by and be like,

hey, explain some things to me. Let's go make some cakes. Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. There's going to be a lot of bleeping here. What happens in Vegas only happens in Vegas, which I don't know why they changed it. By the way, do you know what city we're in right now? We're in Paradise.

Done. First person. Yeah, here. You can have a free sticker. We've got other things to do. We're in Paradise, actually. Las Vegas is just outside. So you and your wife had two tickets to come to Paradise?

Oh, that was a good one. That was a good one coming up. Robert, tell us a little bit about how to maybe follow you and your wife had two tickets to come to Paradise? Oh, that was a good one. That was a good one coming up. Robert, tell us a little bit about how to maybe follow you and Magenic. I think it's at Magenic. At Magenic is Magenic's Twitter handle. I am Robert Cirque on Twitter. I will talk about cloud. I'm not political up there.

I'll talk about Alabama football and cloud modernization. It's the only thing you'll hear. Hey, hey, hey. I know a lot of Auburn people. That could be political. You guys would be good. That's a house divided. Yeah.

It is. At the same time, if my fellow broadcasters wouldn't recognize you have a voice for radio. I do. Do you have some background? Do you have a podcast? You said something about having a blue Yeti microphone. There's a magentic podcast. There is a magentic podcast.

I have not done an episode. One of my goals is to do radio sweepers, so I can just introduce something or someone. I want to DJ or host an event. Do you want to re-record the Dynatrace Perform Las Vegas opening? If you can give me a script, I would try to. All right, yeah, we'll set you up with that. We'll do it real quick.

But Magenic does have a podcast. They do. I'm supposed to be doing that in the next month, but my travels have been really tight lately so and paul's been on there paul's been a couple of the you have some customers that join when they can and but there's other uh you know practitioners and and folks from inside magenic that are sharing so we we will bring in we have uh six or seven different practices that we bring in i share a practice with another another individual, Stuart Williams, and him and I cover all cloud. And then Paul covers what we do in the testing space and test automation space as well.

It's great. So tune in to the Magenic podcast as well, which is great. Yep. Awesome. Well, thank you very much for joining us. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Cool. And Leandra's going to take us out with either guys. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Cool. And Leandra's gonna take us out with either music or more dancing. Yeah. Thanks, everybody. Thank you..