Observability All-Star: Justin Smith, MIM Software

Earlier this month, we announced the Observability All-Star program to recognize DevOps industry professionals and teams.

An Observability All-Star is an engineer dedicated to unleashing the incredible power of machine data–both during routine business operations and periods of crisis. These engineers help their organization gain real, end-to-end visibility into their production environment, delivering top performing infrastructure and applications.

We are happy to announce our first Observability All-Star winner for 2020–Justin Smith, DevOps Engineer for MIM Software!

MIM Software provides practical imaging solutions through mobile and cloud-based platforms for the fields of radiation oncology, radiology, nuclear medicine, urology, neuroimaging, and cardiac imaging.

Justin’s IT career has spanned multiple disciplines, from his start as a technical writer, to his role as IT Analyst and SysAdmin for MIM, to his current position as the organization’s first DevOps Engineer. A long-time proponent of breaking down silos and facilitating collaboration, Justin now finds himself practicing what he preaches by leading the DevOps program and processes for the company. In this role, he oversees the development and scaling of engineering workflows, training on AWS infrastructure, and the organization of DevOps workgroups for infrastructure components such as AWS and Docker. Justin also spearheads MIM’s observability program, and his success deploying technology (like Logz.io) and automating processes is detailed below. Read on to learn why Justin a true All-Star for his organization! 

Observability All-Star 

Justin Smith, DevOps Engineer, MIM Software 

Challenge: 

Without a full DevOps team in place, Justin wears many hats within his IT organization. Scaling and maintaining an ELK stack for log management proved to be difficult with limited resources.

Results:

Implementing Logz.io helped Justin take MIM Software’s observability program to the next level by easing the pain of managing an ELK stack, and improving his team’s overall responsiveness to production issues. MIM now leverages Logz.io for server log analytics and monitoring to gain greater awareness of problems in their IT infrastructure.

“People talk about how easy it is to set up an ELK stack, but it isn’t when you’ve got so many other competing priorities…Logz.io made it easy to get ELK analytics up and running and has excellent added features such as machine learning to pick out additional issues.”

“Logz.io is the gold standard for customer service among vendors I use. They’ve been incredibly patient and generous in helping me get the most of the product.”

“A lot of people think you have to go with a company like Splunk if you want great server analytics. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Logz.io is significantly less expensive and still has great features.”