Meet the Grafana Labs team: Simon Crute, a support engineer for Grafana Cloud and Enterprise

As Grafana Labs continues to grow, we’d like you to get to know our team members. Check out the latest of our Friday team profiles.

Meet Simon!

Name: Simon Crute

Support Engineer Simon Crute

Current location/time zone

BST/GMT: A small village about one hour west of Heathrow airport in the U.K.

What do you do at Grafana Labs?

Support Engineer. One of the follow-the-sun team that handles questions about everything and anything to do with Grafana and associated observability questions from our Enterprise customers, as well as helping Grafana Cloud customers with their Hosted Grafana, Metrics, and Logs.

After nearly 16 years in a large enterprise IT company with about 30,000 employees when I left, it was time for a change!

What open source projects do you contribute to?

In my previous life as a Linux SysAdmin, and now a Support Engineer, I don’t consider myself a developer. I can hack scripts together but very little of that will be good enough to share. In the distant past, I contributed to the MythTV RPMs for OpenSUSE distribution and maintained those for a short while. Recently I submitted my first GitHub PR for RPM packaging for the Grafana Agent.

What are your GitHub and Twitter handles?

GitHub: simonc6372. I don’t do Twitter.

What do you like to do in your free time?

Kids have taken up a majority of my free time over the last 18 years or so. These days I seem to be a part-time taxi driver as well as my job at Grafana Labs.

Until a few years ago I was a keen runner, but injury has put a stop to that. I’m still a keen Fell Walker, (that’s hill/mountain walking for the non-Brits out there) and I’m hoping to walk the U.K.’s coast-to-coast path next summer (190 miles, over 14 days).

Occasionally, You might find me in the Elite Dangerous universe in the Möbius PvE private group.

What’s the best part of your job?

Working for a leading-edge company in the cloud space has been great. Huge learning curves for me to climb, but I’ve loved it.

Full-time working remotely, and working for a company that understands work/life balance, has also been great. Before the pandemic it was great, I could do my bit around the house (doing the laundry or preparing dinner). The pandemic hasn’t made much of a change there, it just means my home office is noisier as I have to share it with my wife now!

What’s your favorite food?

I love Thai and Indian food (or at least the British versions you get here). Especially when you eat out and try a bit of what everyone orders. I’m lucky my wife is a foodie, and loves cooking. Lockdown has not been kind to my waistline!

What’s the last thing you binge-watched?

I might be showing my age, but I’m not normally into binge-watching. More than a couple of episodes, and I want to swap to something else. Saying that, I’ve got into Designated Survivor the last couple of weeks, and that has me watching it for 3-4 hours at a time!

What superpowers do you wish you had?

Teleportation. Driving all over the country to see my family is so tedious!

What’s your greatest achievement?

Many people have ran marathons, but I was really proud of running the Snowdon Mountain marathon and the Scafell Marathon one year, and the London Marathon the following year. I was very chuffed with my 3:59:62 ;-) time for London too.

Do you have any hidden talents?

The inability to see something as out of place once it’s been there for a few hours. My wife would say it’s a disability, but I’m certain it’s a talent.