Anastasios Thomaidis

My name is Anastasios Thomaidis and since July 2020 I have been with Checkmk and Team Lead Consulting NA, responsible for our North American Presales and Consulting Team.

What made you decide to start at Checkmk?

During my education at my former employer, I was using Checkmk and learned it on my own. Checkmk was also a part of my final exam.

I was responsible for all monitoring projects in the team and I learned how important monitoring is. With Checkmk it was easy to identify problems we could not find before.

Monitoring was becoming a more and more important task of my job and I could imagine working at Checkmk to learn more about Checkmk, monitoring, and the company behind this fantastic tool.

What fascinates you most about your job at Checkmk and what are your tasks?

What fascinates me most about my job at Checkmk is the flat hierarchy and the high level of flexibility. I really appreciate that employees are encouraged to bring in their own ideas and suggestions and see them genuinely considered.

Since Checkmk is an open-source company and product, I also enjoy working with a wide range of open-source technologies and staying closely connected to modern, up-to-date tech. My role is very diverse and includes tasks such as presales, consulting, and support, as well as collaborating with globally operating teams.

Additionally, earlier this year we’ve established an APAC team, and I was asked to help with hiring and training. That really shows how much the company values experience from our US business and actively brings those insights into new regions.

How was your journey within Checkmk and becoming Team Lead for the US Consulting Team? What did you enjoy the most?

My journey at Checkmk took an exciting turn when I was asked to move to the US and join our office in Atlanta to help ramp up the business and build a local support team. One of the main challenges was that Checkmk was not well known in the US market at the time, so I had to design and implement an onboarding plan to bridge that gap and enable the team to get up to speed quickly.

I stayed in the US for about 15 months, and when I moved back to Germany, I was able to continue leading the US team remotely, which I really appreciate. Today, the team consists of seven people spread across the United States.

What I enjoyed and still enjoy the most is collaborating closely with the team and bringing my Checkmk expertise into a new and very different market. Building something from scratch that can have a real impact on the company has been incredibly motivating and rewarding

What tools/technologies do you work with in your team? How do you get in contact with the customers?

In our day-to-day work, we interact with customers through calls and meetings using tools like Zoom, TeamViewer, WebEx and MS Teams. Additionally, our customers can open tickets in Jira Service Desk.

Within the team, we primarily communicate via Slack, Pascom, and Zimbra and use Google Workspace for email and collaboration. Our internal documentation is maintained in Confluence.

From a technical perspective, we work with a variety of tools, with the most important ones being Docker, Vagrant, Git, and Ansible.

What is the special challenge at Checkmk?

One of the most exciting challenges at Checkmk is the constant learning curve. Checkmk offers an extensive set of features and leverages a wide range of technologies, which makes it impossible to have an answer for every scenario right away. Because our customers have very diverse environments and questions, we are continuously challenged to explore new use cases and technologies. This is what keeps our work dynamic and ensures that we stay up to date in a fast-evolving technical landscape.