Oleg, a simple thank you.

I think it's about time someone wrote about the famous Oleg Vishnepolsky! Some people get to be friends with movie stars... some of us share a Linkedin star!

By now we all know how he got the job at DoubleClick.

Oleg was my peer working for Greg Tagaris - DoubleClick's CIO and Pizza delivery guy on the side when "S!@#$ was hitting the fan" (technology term) in the datacenters.

Because of my role running the performance, monitoring & SLA team (Quality of Services) I often did not have the “most frictionless” relationships with my peers. (bearer of bad news)

But Oleg embraced what we did the first day I sat down with him to explain the QoS group’s roles and mission.

Many people say we cannot improve what we do not measure... Oleg not only believed in that, but he acted on it daily! He even wanted more numbers. Not once, he questioned the telemetry for the sake of self-protection. He believed 1000% in our mission to be the best, fastest and most reliable adserving platform and he knew we would not have achieved any of those goals unless we have a monitoring first and performance culture.

Many looked at monitoring as a nice to have. For him it was a MUST have. It was never an afterthought! Very refreshing back in the days…

When it came to one of my biggest project of my career at DoubleClick in 2001/2002, code name Gold, where we actually built our own agentless application performance management framework, he was my sidekick on the engineering side. Thanks to him we were able to deploy our monitoring library in C, C++, Perl, Java… inside over 90 different applications. We were able to rally the entire Eng. team around this vision and he excelled and making sure it would happen. He sold it to the engineers! He knew how to do that very well. He brought people together around a shared vision, kept his cool and was very diplomatic.

When I left with a few others ex-Clickers to start a monitoring company he was one the few we consulted with to make sure we would hit the Oleg’s standards.

16 Years have passed since he joined the technology executive team at DoubleClick. He has not changed since! Still true to his many values and the one I care the most about: you cannot improve what you do not measure.

So, Oleg many of us would not be where we are today without your help, coaching, guidance, perseverance and high standards. Thank you!

Mehdi