Michael Sphar Email & Phone Number

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Il, Us

Chicago, Illinois, Us

Chicago, Il, Us

Me and my team work to ensure visibility of the health and performance of services running in datacenters and cloud services.We maintain some on-premise tools like Nagios, collectd, statsd, graphite, and grafana that are still keeping an eye on hosts and network gear, and we assist with migrations to more modern services like Datadog for providing monitoring and observability of distributed applications and cloud services.We built and maintain a log ingestion and transformation pipeline that has handled over 9TB/day of logs so far, using tools such as rsyslog, kafka, and fluentd to enrich and structure those logs and ship them to Amazon S3 for long-term archiving and consumption by the data lake, and also to Sumologic for ad-hoc searching, visualizations, and troubleshooting. As more applications move to Kubernetes, we're implementing a daemonset with fluent-bit to capture the high volumes of container logs, automatically extract structured data, and enrich them with Kubernetes metadata.We took over one of the worst paging rotations in the company, and committed ourselves to making it better. Within a year the volume of pages was reduced by over 90% (most of those pages were noise and did not reflect degraded customer experience). We aligned monitoring with SLOs and made refinements to alert rules and Pagerduty to eliminate duplicate and flapping alerts. We established processes and guidelines to keep paging rotations healthy and low-stress and were able to hand that paging rotation back to the development team who now has far fewer sleepless nights. The processes and guidelines we established were then used by other dev teams to make their paging rotations better as well.

Chicago, Il, Us

Neuhausen, Schaffhausen, Ch

Provide deployment and ongoing administration of a dynamic environment of 400-500 Linux servers running as physical machines, VMware guests, and Amazon EC2 instances for production, development, and test environments.Provide support and administration to Amazon Web Services (AWS), including Identity & Access Management (IAM), Elastic Compute (EC2) instances, Elastic Load Balancers (ELB), Relational Database Service (RDS), Redshift, and Cloudfront.Work closely with development, QA, and operations staff to assist with troubleshooting of production applications and deployment of new products and updates. Assist in developing and implementing improvements to build automation and deployments.Investigate and troubleshoot performance issues with applications and servers to identify bottlenecks and implement or recommend solutions.Participate in cross-functional architecture and design teams for future product development.Support new product lab teams in development, testing, and implementation of potential new product offerings.Implemented open source centralized log collection and analysis solution via ELK stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana)Built and deployed MongoDB clusters in AWS. Transparently migrated on-premise MongoDB test cluster to AWS to improve performance and alleviate load stress to on-premise test environment with no cluster downtime.

Chicago, Il, Us

Responsible for operation and maintenance of approximately 300 mostly CentOS and openSuse Linux servers installed in several data centers in the US and EuropeOperating system and hardware/BIOS tuning for low-latency trading applicationsDevelopment, implementation, and ongoing maintenance of global monitoring solution (Zabbix) to provide real-time monitoring and trend collection for operating systems and server hardwareOngoing development and maintenance of automated configuration management tools for Linux servers (Cfengine, Ansible, shell scripting)Management of Network Appliance Filer storage servers (NFS/CIFS)Linux OS installations and upgrades. Developed new Kickstart implementation for automating CentOS installations consistently across heterogeneous physical and virtual hardware platformsWork closely with diverse development teams in customizing standard server configurations for specialized trading applicationsAnalyze and investigate potential server performance issues with trading services, work closely with development and network teams to recommend and implement solutions to meet performance requirementsWork closely with development teams in configuring and testing potential new hardware platformsCollaborate across disciplines as part of a team of skilled IT professionals, developers, and traders to best achieve firm goals within budget and on schedule

Houston, Texas, Us

Maintain and support UNIX and Window servers and Network Appliance Filers in mixed UNIX/Windows environmentImplement and support VMware virtualization solutions for production servers and for R&D development/QA labsMaintain, support, develop, and update Remedy Action Request System applicationsMentor junior and mid-level system administration and support staffProvide 24/7 support for critical applications and serversResolve internal customer issues submitted via on-line help desk system, phone, and e-mail.Recognize and support the special needs of software research and developmentSupported systems and labs in California while telecommuting from Chicago, IL from 2001 through 2007.

Carlsbad, California, Us

Resolve internal customer issues submitted via on-line help desk system, phone, and e-mail.Provide hardware and software support for Windows and UNIX systems running various flavors of their respective operating systems and languages.Set up and administer Jumpstart installation scripts for automating Solaris installations.UNIX, Microsoft Exchange, and Windows account administration

San Jose, California, Us

Provide Mac, Windows, and UNIX hardware and software support, resolving internal support issues when able and escalating to level-2 support when necessary.Administer and provide ongoing enhancements to the Remedy ARS Help desk System.Develop and maintain automated daily, weekly, and quarterly service-level reports through the Remedy system.Develop or update tools to assist or simplify Help Desk tasks.

Overland Park, Ks, Us

Provide technical support for a UNIX-based RDBMS on a variety of UNIX platforms, including AIX, Ultrix, SCO Unix, DG/UX, and others, and handle support issues via phone, FAX, and remote accessServe as an engineering technical resource to customer service. Provide minor bug fixes and enhancements and follow the guidelines set by Engineering policies and proceduresSet up and configure systems, applications, and interfaces in UNIX and DOS-based environmentsWrite custom reports and scripts for customers as neededProvide 24/7 on-call, after-hours supportConduct application training courses for new customers

Bachelor Of Arts, Information Technology

Associate Of Arts (A.A.)