Pradeep Shunmugam
Observability & Automation Engineer
Hire this person
Send a job offer directly to this candidate
About
Observability and Automation Engineer with 6+ years designing, implementing, and migrating enterprise monitoring solutions across on-prem and cloud-native environments. Deep expertise in AppDynamics, ClickHouse, Grafana, and Splunk, with hands-on experience building Kubernetes-based observability pipelines using OpenTelemetry, Cilium, and eBPF-based auto-instrumentation. Proven track record automating operational workflows in Python, reducing manual effort by up to 90%, and cutting incident response time through data-driven alerting.
Actively expanding into cloud-native and distributed systems engineering with Go, gRPC, and Kubernetes.
Experience
Observability Engineer — Splunk, Grafana, ClickHouse at Cognizant Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd (2025-07 – Present)
- Migrated Splunk SPL queries to ClickHouse SQL, improving query performance across billions of logs and metric events and enabling large-scale dashboard and alert migration.
- Designed 150+ Grafana dashboards surfacing business and operational metrics for product stakeholders.
- Built real-time ClickHouse-integrated Bosun alerting for critical system metrics, reducing incident response time.
- Automated scheduled Grafana reporting, delivering recurring KPI insights to product and engineering teams.
Observability Engineer — AppDynamics at Cognizant Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd (2020-03 – 2025-07)
- Delivered full-stack observability for monolithic applications via AppDynamics APM and End User Monitoring, covering application, database, and OS-level visibility.
- Reduced application response latency by 25% through performance bottleneck analysis with Development and Operations teams.
- Designed custom Health Rules, anomaly detection, and alerting policies to proactively identify performance degradation before business impact.
- Led AppDynamics on-premises to SaaS migration with zero monitoring downtime; owned platform administration including agent onboarding, dashboards, and alerting.
- Configured the AppDynamics IBM MQ Machine Agent Extension for custom queue and message metrics.
- Extended End User Monitoring to Salesforce and monolithic applications to track real user experience and page load performance.
Automation — Python at Cognizant Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd (2024-05 – 2025-07)
- Built Python automation for health checks and CSV error detection, cutting manual review effort by up to 90%.
- Deployed scheduled remote-execution scripts via Windows Task Scheduler across distributed servers.
Infrastructure Monitoring — SCOM & IBM Tivoli (ITM) at Cognizant Technology Solutions Pvt Ltd (2020-03 – 2025-07)
- Designed and implemented SCOM architecture; migrated monitoring from IBM Tivoli (ITM) to SCOM.
- Created Windows service monitor, Linux process/service monitor to notify application/server teams to reduce the application down time
- Have a strong experience of server and URL monitoring in both SCOM and ITM.
- Implemented monitoring for all the workgroup servers in SCOM with SSL certificate for each server.
- Analysed application and server performance using SCOM reports, providing actionable insights to reduce downtime.
Cloud-Native Observability Engineer at Independent Project
- Deployed a multi-node Kubernetes cluster (kubeadm, Cilium CNI) on AWS EC2 and integrated Splunk Observability Cloud via the OpenTelemetry Collector (Helm), enabling infrastructure metrics, container-level telemetry, and eBPF-based auto-instrumentation (OBI) without application code changes.
- Independently diagnosed and resolved production-grade networking issues, including CNI/VXLAN Security Group misconfigurations, cross-node DNS failures, and container runtime image-store mismatches, restoring full observability data flow end-to-end.
- Evaluating OpenTelemetry as a long-term migration path from vendor-specific tooling (AppDynamics, Splunk) toward a unified, vendor-neutral observability standard.
Education
B.E. – K.S. Rangasamy College of Technology (2014 – 2018)
