?
What does failure look like to the customer?
Define it in terms the business cares about.
SRE · Observability · Dynatrace
Reliability
You Can See
An independent site reliability engineering and observability practice for enterprises that have spent real money on tooling and still aren't seeing the reliability they paid for.
The Problem
Observability spend keeps climbing. Incident volume, time to diagnosis, and on-call fatigue mostly haven't moved.
The gap is rarely the platform. It's service level objectives nobody acts on, alerts tuned for coverage instead of action, and telemetry collected because someone could, not because anyone had a question.
I have sat in reviews looking at a dashboard opened dozens of times a day that had never once changed a decision. Nobody could defend deleting it either, because nobody remembered why it was built. Most monitoring environments end up this way. They accumulate, one reasonable decision at a time.
How We Work
From first principles rather than inherited defaults.
Three questions come first, before anything about what to instrument, what to alert on, or which platform to run it on:
?
What signal would reveal it?
Instrument and collect only what answers that question.
?
What would we do once we knew?
Build the operating model so someone acts on it.
Sometimes the answer is to use what is already there. Sometimes it is to pull a dozen overlapping tools onto one platform. The tooling decision comes last, after the questions have been answered.
From there the work falls into four areas. Usually in this order, and rarely all of them in one engagement:
Diagnose
Where the practice stands today, scored and supported by evidence.
Design
Service levels, error budgets, and alerting that are actionable by construction.
Implement
Dynatrace architecture, deployment, tuning, and migration from legacy platforms.
Operationalize
Incident response, escalation, and runbook patterns, shaped to the processes your teams own.
Training runs through all four. Engineers are taught the reasoning, so they can extend the practice to services that don't exist yet. What matters is what your team can do once the engagement ends.
Dynatrace, at Depth
Platform depth, applied in the right order.
- A Dynatrace-centered practice with working depth across OneAgent, Smartscape, Grail and DQL, Davis AI, OpenPipeline, AutomationEngine, SLIs, SLOs, Error Budgets, and Site Reliability Guardian.
- Product knowledge is the easy part. The harder question is which capabilities to switch on, in what order, for an organization at a particular stage of maturity, and which to leave off until the practice is ready for them. Dynatrace's anomaly detection is excellent, and it is wasted on an environment where tagging is inconsistent, because the findings arrive without enough context to be trusted.
- Switch them on out of order and a strong platform produces weak outcomes. That usually gets diagnosed as a tooling problem, which leads to buying more tooling.
Who Does the Work
Principal-level, directly delivered.
Every hour is principal-level, delivered directly.
No delivery pyramid, no ramp-up billed to the client, no handoffs.
- Former Vice President of Site Reliability Engineering at a large financial organization, leading SRE in a regulated environment handling PII at scale.
- Three current Dynatrace certifications: Implementation Professional and Administration Professional, covering deployment and platform operations, plus the DEM and Business Analytics Specialist certification for digital experience monitoring.
- Nine active technical certifications in total, adding Splunk, Cribl, BigPanda, AWS, and Azure.
- Led the architecture and build of an enterprise Dynatrace platform from the ground up for a major healthcare enterprise, with PHI and PII safeguards designed into the telemetry.
- SAFe 6 certified Product Owner; led the Agile team delivering observability across a large enterprise's consumer-facing web applications.
- Thirty years of IT reliability experience and twenty-eight years of engineering leadership.
Start With the Problem
If your observability investment isn't producing the reliability it should, start with why.
The first conversation is about what's happening, what you've already tried, and whether I can help. No sales deck, no predetermined engagement. Sometimes the honest answer is that your plan is sound and you should carry on.