Introducing the MongoDB Masters Program for 2018

Michael Lynn
June 8, 2018 | Updated: November 15, 2019
#Community

My name is Michael Lynn and I’m the Worldwide Director of Developer Advocacy at MongoDB. I’m incredibly proud to be a part of the Developer Relations and Marketing team here at MongoDB.

A majority of what we do in Developer Advocacy is related to increasing awareness of MongoDB within the community of developers and data scientists. We do this through involvement in a variety of user groups, industry conferences, and events as well as through management of the MongoDB Masters Program.

This program was created to recognize leaders within their community, experts in MongoDB, and professionals who freely share their knowledge. This year’s class includes returning Masters, as well as new members who have distinguished themselves in the past year.

MongoDB Masters in years past have provided valuable product feedback and driven thought leadership in their fields. We look forward to deepening this relationship over the coming year. This year’s class of Masters will also be encouraged to participate in beta testing programs, share their experiences with MongoDB, and continue to expand and broaden their own voices as leaders in the technical community.

The Masters program has been an incredibly rewarding and valuable program for MongoDB and we greatly appreciate the efforts of our most vocal, and most active supporters. This is why we’ve put so much time and effort into creating a program to recognize these individuals and thank them for their contributions.

Master Honorees enjoy benefits ranging from access to the MongoDB Engineering and Product Management teams to discounted MongoDB Atlas Credits.

Preparations are underway for the MongoDB Masters Summit, which will be held on Tuesday, June 26th as part of MongoDB World 2018. We’ll have several speakers and a special Q&A session with Eliot Horowitz, our Co-Founder, and CTO. We encourage all members of our community to register for MongoDB World 2018, meet the Masters in person, and join our Advocacy Hub to start their own path to becoming a MongoDB Master.

So, all this talk of Masters – how, you might be thinking, do I become a Master?

Before I dive into an explanation of the requirements, please take a moment to review the bios of some of the existing Masters. You’ll easily spot some things in common across all of these incredibly talented and accomplished individuals.

Passion

Masters are passionate about technology and about solutions to technical problems. This passion drives these individuals to do things that few technologists will do. While this attribute is common among the existing and past Masters, it’s not easy to measure. You know it when you see it and it’s woven into the careers of many of the people I’ve encountered surrounding this program.

Impact

If passion is fuel, then impact is fire. Impact is the result of the passionate pursuit of worthy causes. Again, this is an attribute easily found in common across our Masters membership. Measuring impact is also difficult because in many cases, especially when dealing with the Masters, the impact of their actions, projects, and even their careers is widespread. Masters are individuals that positively impact their families, teams, companies, and their communities.

Execution

Execution is the spark that ignites fire. Elegant, efficient and effective solutions to technical challenges rarely, if ever, happen by accident. Rather, truly successful solutions require intelligent, deliberate execution – and in most cases, hard work. I strongly encourage you to spend time with any of the Masters and it will become clear that these individuals know how to execute. They know how to get things accomplished.

These are the attributes of a MongoDB Master and to achieve membership, an individual should be passionate about great technology and about solving technical problems. These individuals should have demonstrated, through successful execution, a massively beneficial impact on their company, team and/or community.

Are you interested in becoming a MongoDB Master, or do you think you may already meet the requirements? I would like to invite you to join us at MongoDB World in New York to learn more; consider completing the nomination form below to have yourself or a colleague considered for a MongoDB Masters membership.

MongoDB Masters membership nomination →

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Stratifyd & MongoDB: AI-Driven Business Insights to Keep Customers Happy

2017 was a banner year for MongoDB's partner ecosystem. We remain strategic about engaging with our channels, and the results are validating our approach. Our strong network of ISVs, global system integrators, cloud, resellers, and technology partners is a competitive differentiator that helps us scale. We are especially excited about the innovation and growth in store for our ISV business in 2018. It's already off to a great start. Our newest ISV partner Stratifyd is a fantastic example of how platforms built around MongoDB address serious market needs with the most cutting-edge, innovative technology. Stratifyd is an end-to-end customer analytics platform powered by AI. The platform provides competitive advantages to some of the most recognized brands in the world. LivePerson, Etsy, MASCO, Kimberly-Clark, and many more rely on Stratifyd for a 360-degree view of their end customers. Stratifyd analyzes customer interactions such as online reviews, social media posts, phone calls, emails, chats, surveys, CRM data, and more to turn them into actionable business insights which increase customer acquisition and retention, which is critical to the continued success of Stratifyd’s clients. In addition to these benefits, Stratifyd is just a flat-out cool implementation of AI. I caught up with Stratifyd's CTO, Kevin O'Dell, to discuss the data technology behind the platform, and how MongoDB drives value for their customers. --- For anyone that isn’t familiar with Stratifyd yet, how do you describe the platform? Stratifyd uses human generated data to analyze, categorize, and understand intent with the purpose of changing human behavior. This changes the way brands interact with their customers, but also the way customers interact with brands, increasing customer acquisition and raising retention rates. What was the genesis of the company? Why did you set out to build this? Stratifyd was a result of postdoctoral research done at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. Our founders were researching how AI could analyze unstructured data. During their research, they discovered strong business and government use cases. The founding team was working with numerous three letter agencies on predicting terrorist and disease movements globally. They were able to raise millions of dollars in funding from these agencies. The demand for a product organically grew from there, which led to the development of the Stratifyd platform. I love the insights Stratifyd can provide – how would you describe the unique advantages that Stratifyd gives its customers? Stratifyd provides near real-time business intelligence for contact center, marketing, product, and customer experience teams, all based on customer interactions. These insights enable businesses to be proactive rather than reactive in regard to business strategy. Stratifyd customers are able to respond to customer requests, complaints, or general feedback in near real time, changing the way companies interact with their end users. For example, we have empowered a customer with the knowledge to launch a new product line. Another customer gained insights that fundamentally changed how they are rolling out a 700+ million-dollar brand in a new continent. What kind of feedback are you getting from customers that have deployed Stratifyd in their businesses? Our customers love using our platform. They are surprised at how simple it is to use, and how powerful it is. They really appreciate how Stratifyd is making AI and machine learning meaningful for them in their day-to day-lives. Stratifyd helps ensure measurable results from day one. Speaking of implementation, they REALLY love that we don’t just use the term day one figuratively – customers are up and running in less than a day. Talk to me about how you landed on MongoDB. What were you looking for in a database, and what problems were you having before moving to MongoDB? That's an easy one to answer: speed and flexibility. Stratifyd ingests data from hundreds of sources. We needed a database that could keep up with high read and write request rates while handling a flexible schema. The hardest problem we were trying to solve was lack of secondary indexes; with those, MongoDB accelerated our query response times by at least 100x. Can you share any best practices for scaling your MongoDB infrastructure? Any impressive metrics around the number of interactions, the volume of reads / writes per second, response times? As a SaaS-first platform, being always-on is a HUGE best practice for us. MongoDB’s innate replication and failover abilities ensured less than 17 minutes of total downtime last year! Using MongoDB as our backend system, our AI can process a quarter of a million words in less than a minute. How do you measure the impact of MongoDB on your business? Our business wouldn’t be able to succeed without MongoDB. The uptime, failover, query response times, secondary indexes, and dynamic schemas have empowered most of Stratifyd’s key differentiators. What advice would you give someone who is considering using MongoDB for their next project? With all projects, I recommend truly understanding the requirements for the end results. There is a ton of excellent technology out there, but picking the wrong one can be detrimental to project success. Always run numerous tests, comparing different stacks to make sure you find the right one and fail fast on the wrong technology stack. Stratifyd has some impressive customers, from the Fortune 500 to some really innovative startups: what’s next for the company? We have some pretty big things planned for 2018. We're now providing more than just actionable intelligence; we are now streamlining and automating workflows. We are closing the customer feedback loop, which enables us to plug Stratifyd into any business process quickly to deliver measurable results.

June 7, 2018
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MongoDB Database Observability: Integrating with Monitoring Tools

This post is the final in a three-part series on leveraging database observability. Welcome back to our series on Leveraging Database Observability! Our previous post showcased a real-world use case highlighting how MongoDB Atlas’s observability tools effectively tackle database performance challenges. Whether you’re a developer, DBA, or DevOps engineer, our mission is to empower you to harness the full potential of your data through our observability suite . Integrating Atlas metrics with your central enterprise observability tools can simplify your operations. By seamlessly working with popular observability tools, our approach helps teams streamline workflows and enhance visibility across systems. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with third-party monitoring tools MongoDB’s developer data platform combines all essential data services for building modern applications within a unified experience. Our purpose-built observability tools for Atlas environments offer automatic monitoring and optimization, guiding diagnostics tailored specifically for MongoDB. Additionally, we extend Atlas metrics into your existing enterprise observability stack, enabling seamless integration without replacing your current tools. This creates a consolidated, single-pane view that unifies Atlas telemetry with other tech and application metrics, ensuring comprehensive visibility into both database and full-stack performance. This integration empowers you to monitor, receive alerts, and make data-driven decisions within your existing workflows, driving greater efficiency. Below is a quick guide to modifying integration settings through the Atlas UI and the popular integrations we support: Navigate to the Project Integrations page in Atlas. Choose the organization and project you want to configure from the navigation bar. On the Project Integrations page, select the third-party services you’d like to integrate. Configure the chosen services with the required API keys and regions. Critical integrations for your observability platform With Atlas’s Datadog and Prometheus integrations, you can send critical MongoDB metrics to these platforms, empowering detailed, real-time monitoring. Through Datadog , you can track database operation counts, query efficiency, and resource usage, ideal for pinpointing bottlenecks and managing resources. Similarly, Prometheus enables you to monitor essential metrics like query times, connection rates, and memory usage, supporting flexible tracking of database health and performance. Both integrations facilitate proactive detection of issues, alert configuration for resource thresholds, and a cohesive view of Atlas data when visualized in Grafana. Atlas’s integration with PagerDuty streamlines incident management by sending metrics like performance alerts, billing anomalies, and security events directly to PagerDuty. This integration records incidents automatically, notifies teams upon alerts, and supports two-way syncing, ensuring resolved alerts in Atlas are reflected in PagerDuty. It enables efficient incident response and resource allocation to maintain system stability. With Atlas integrations for Microsoft Teams and Slack, you can route key metrics—such as query latency, disk usage, and throughput—to these channels for timely updates. Teams can use these insights for real-time performance monitoring, incident response, and collaboration. Notifications through these platforms ensure your team stays informed on database performance, storage health, and user activity changes as they occur. Use case: Centralized observability with MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack Let’s walk through a hypothetical scenario for ShopSmart, an e-commerce company that leverages MongoDB Atlas to manage its product catalog and customer data. As traffic surges, the DevOps team faces challenges in monitoring application performance and database health effectively. To tackle these challenges, the team leverages MongoDB Atlas’ integration with Datadog and Slack, creating a powerful observability ecosystem. Integrating MongoDB Atlas with Datadog: The team pushes key MongoDB Atlas metrics into Datadog, such as query performance, connection counts, and Atlas Vector Search metrics. With Datadog, they can visualize these metrics and correlate overall MongoDB performance with their other applications. Out-of-the-box monitors and dedicated dashboards allow the team to track metrics like throughput, average read/write latency, and current connections. This visibility helps pinpoint bottlenecks in real time, ensuring optimal database performance and improving overall application responsiveness. Setting up alerts in Datadog: The team configures alerts for critical metrics like high query latency and increased error rates. When thresholds are breached, Datadog instantly notifies the team. This proactive approach allows the team to address potential performance issues before they impact customers. Integrating Datadog with Slack: To ensure fast communication, alerts are sent directly to the dedicated Slack channel, “ShopSmart-Alerts.” This integration fosters seamless collaboration, enabling the team to discuss and resolve issues in real-time. With these integrations, ShopSmart’s engineering team can monitor performance quickly and address issues efficiently. The unified observability approach enhances operational efficiency, improves the customer experience, and supports ShopSmart’s competitive edge in the e-commerce industry. By leveraging MongoDB Atlas, Datadog, and Slack, the team ensures scalable performance and drives continuous innovation. Conclusion MongoDB Atlas empowers developers and organizations to achieve unparalleled observability and control over their database environments. By seamlessly integrating with central enterprise observability tools, Atlas enhances your ability to monitor performance metrics and ensures you can do so within your existing workflows. This means you can focus on building modern applications confidently, knowing you have the insights and alerts necessary to maintain optimal performance. Embrace the power of MongoDB Atlas and transform your approach to database management—because your applications can thrive when your data is observable. And that wraps up our Leveraging Database Observability series! We hope you learned something new and found value in these discussions. Sign up for MongoDB Atlas , our cloud database service, to see database observability in action. To dive deeper and expand your knowledge, check out this learning byte for more insights on the MongoDB observability suite and how it can enhance your database performance.

November 14, 2024