Ask an F5er- AMA with guest Shaun Gouws

Might take a few beers... and i want to preface this response with: No animals were injured, nor was I affected emotionally by this event.

One of my customers had a site down, which for those perhaps not in this domain means one of their core appliications was no longer working, directlt affecting revenue, which for large customers can be millions of dollars for every moment of downtime, so it gets heated at times. This particular event had all hands on deck, across multiple timezones, starting in EMEA, then to North America and ended being resolved by our PE team in APCJ. 

I joined the call with the customer and engineering team at 4PM EST. We had setup 4 hour check-ins and by our 1st check-in call I had a very angry VP yealling and cursing (not at me, just out of frustration). We didn't have a resolution or even much progress at that stage. At the pinacle of that exchange my wife walked in to grab something from my office and heard all of this go down. Since she couldn't speak to me in the room, she decided to text me this. "Are you alright?" It made me realise that I had developed the ability to only speak when necessary and not take things personally. 

We continued to check in periodically and one of my favourite things that happened was that the product engineer had identified the problem and was working on a fix in real time, and by 4am we had the issue resolved in theory and it just needed testing - what I really apprecaited about all of this focus was that the product engineer allowed me to stay on a call with him while he worked and he explained what he was doing every step of the way. 

It was an incredible experience for me to see how his brain worked, the calculations, troubleshooting, testing was just amazing and it showed me just how hard it is to support customers as well as we do. So whilst I was tired, the "mentoring experience" I got there was invaluable.

We all have war stories in the SDM world... just the nature of the role. I encourage anyone who knows a Service Delivery Manager to buy them a beer and ask the same question.