Tag: Interview

Community, Interviews, SCOM

Leon Laude [Interview]

This time, we are meeting Leon, who is a very passionate about sharing his knowledge with the community and help others! He is definitely one of those guys that you go to to get your stuff done! Let’s get to know him better:

Q: Please tell us a little about yourself and your background.
A: My name is Leon Laude, I work as a full time consultant in mid-size company in Stockholm, Sweden. My focus is mainly on Microsoft products, such as Windows Server, System Center, Hyper-V, Azure, Active Directory and a few others. I started working with these roughly 7 years ago, I started my IT career as a help desk agent, then I moved on to 2nd line support for workstations and printers, and eventually I ended up working with everything within the data center such as servers, firewalls, networks and storage within the Windows environment.
Q: I see you are very active on Technet Forums and also run your personal blog. What attracted you to get involved into community contributions?
A: I like to help people, I have always liked helping others, it brings me joy in life and I can also learn many new things by helping others.
I’ve known the Microsoft TechNet community for quite some time now, and I’ve noticed how many questions get asked there, but there are also many questions that are struggling to get some answers. There is clearly a big need of more help there, so I thought that I can share my knowledge with others, and maybe it could be useful or help them out, so I ended up contributing to the community by answering and troubleshooting people’s questions and also writing Wiki articles.
Q: What technologies do you think are on the rise dominantly in near future? 
 
A: This is always an interesting question, but I think we can all agree on that the cloud is growing bigger and becoming more popular.
From what I hear and experience from current customers and colleagues, many companies want to go with the hybrid model, meaning having both on-premises and cloud services.
Another technology that is rising is containers, I believe this will also play a bigger role in the future.
Q: What advice would you give to the new IT professionals to be successful in their journey?
A: What you need to know about IT is that it’s constantly changing, find something you feel comfortable to work with and something you enjoy doing.
Don’t get stuck with some tool, because it won’t last forever, try to be open to new things and keep yourself up-to date with where the IT industry is heading.
It is also very important to keep a good balance between your work and your personal life.
Q: What do you enjoy to do when you’re not working?
 
A: I spend a lot of time contributing to the Microsoft TechNet community, because I enjoy doing it, which doesn’t actually leave me that much time to do other things.
My other passions are travelling around the world, doing sports to keep myself fit, being with my girlfriend, family and friends. I do love the nature and I’ve always liked exploring and trying out new things!
Thanks for the interview! 🙂
Thanks a lot Leon for chatting with us! 
You can get in touch with him here:
Cheers
Community, SCOM

Cyril Azoulay – An expert behind the mask! – [Interview]

I am a regular visitor/contributor to the SCOM Technet Forums and regularly meet many experts from around the globe there. Fortunately for me I eventually became friends/acquaintances with many of them. One of them is Cyril! If you have posted a question in the forums, you may very well have received the solution from a “CyrAz”, that’s him! 😉

I was able to convince Cyril to feature in one of our community experts interview series, and from his answers you can easily guess the knowledge and experience Cyril possesses! Enough chatter from me, I will let Cyril do the talking now:

Q: Hi Cyril! Thanks for agreeing to this. I see you very often on the SCOM Technet forums, and from what I can tell, you really know what you’re talking about! Can you please tell us a little about yourself and your professional journey so far?
A: Thanks for having me 🙂
I’m a system consultant and I almost exclusively work on Microsoft technologies. I work on quite a lot of them (Active Directory, PKI, Exchange, Direct Access, HyperV/Storage Space direct and even Azure Stack these days) but my current field of expertise is System Center, and more specifically SCOM and Orchestrator.
I started working on these two technologies around 6 years ago when my boss wanted me to specialize on something and asked me if I was interested in System Center. I said yes, because I was interested in the whole “everything is integrated together” aspect of the suite, being able to manage every aspect of the datacenter etc. I quickly realized this ideal world only existed in Microsoft’s presentations and that most of these products were actually not designed to run together and were even pretty clunky by themselves, but I still really liked what they allowed to do!
So I went from customer to customer, doing things that were more and more complicated, from daily operator tasks to architecture design and complex MP development; until now where I believe I can call myself an “expert”, even though I’m still learning things every day. I’ve only started using Visual Studio for MP developments a little bit over a year ago!
And I can say that blogs and Technet forums helped me a lot during this journey, it’s really nice to have such a knowledgeable and sharing  community!
Q: What is your opinion about Microsoft’s strategy of 2 different models for System Center products? What do you prefer, the LTSC or SAC model?

A: I’m glad Microsoft is still developing SCOM, and I can’t wait to get the most recent improvements so I definitely prefer SAC. But to be honest, I’m a bit disappointed by what was added in 1801 and 1807… I’m convinced SCOM has great foundations, the Management Pack system is incredibly powerful and flexible, but there is so much that could be done to improve the final product!

Now from my customers point of view, it really depends on how much they can afford in maintaining their environments… if they have a dedicated team that has enough knowledge, they can go for SAC. If they rely exclusively on me coming from time to time to check that everything is running properly, that may not be the best idea.

Q: How do you feel about the whole SCOM vs. OMS argument? Will OMS be a viable “replacement” for SCOM?
A: I must say I really like Log Analytics and what it is becoming, especially since Kusto query language was released. I was already a huge fan of competing products such as Splunk, and that pretty much sums up what I think about the SCOM vs Log Analytics argument : it has no reason to exist since they are not competitors!
Log Analytics is becoming a great tool for… well, ingesting, archiving and analyzing logs of all kind.
But for now it is a terrible replacement for SCOM, regardless of what Microsoft is trying to make us believe! It doesn’t provide any solution to replace the huge list of existing management packs and everything they include, it doesn’t provide an easy solution to develop your own monitoring, it has terrible SLA regarding data ingestion latency…
However, I can very well see how they can work together to provide more information on your environment, and how Log Analytics can become a good monitoring tool someday. But definitely not today, and probably not tomorrow neither.
Q: Given a chance, what would you like to ask or advise to Microsoft?
A: Don’t abandon great tools that can still provide tremendous service to many people just because you believe they are not the future! And maybe try to make them a little bit more usable by non experts…
Q: Lastly, the traditional question! Star Wars or Star Trek?
A: A 4-cheese pizza and a cold beer, thanks 🙂
Awesome! Thanks again for sharing your expertise with us Cyril, and I hope you will continue to help the folks on the forums! 😀
You can also get in touch with him on LinkedIn:
You can also visit his blog (in French) here:
Cheers!
Sam