Cedric Ziel
Principal Product Manager at Grafana Labs
Halver, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolCedric Ziel is a Principal Product Manager with 15 years of hands-on engineering and product leadership experience, currently focused on application and frontend observability at Grafana Labs. He blends deep technical chops—contributions to TYPO3, Symfony plugins, LiipImagineBundle, and microservice instrumentation—with a product-first mindset that turns complex telemetry and tracing challenges into usable features. Cedric has driven OpenTelemetry and distributed tracing strategy and built deployment-friendly observability agents across languages and runtimes, informed by prior roles as a senior engineer and product manager at Instana/IBM. He regularly contributes to open-source projects, improving code quality, testing, and integration, and has a knack for bridging low-level engineering (eBPF, tracers) with customer-facing product decisions. Based in Germany, he codes for curiosity and prefers solving more problems than he creates, often surfacing non-obvious reliability and integration fixes that improve long-term maintainability.
15 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Wirtschaftsinformatik, Wirtschaftsinformatik at Paderborn University
German, English
Stackoverflow
1,052reputation
70kreached
24answers
4questions
Github Skills (61)
unit-testing10
fluid10
content-management-system10
debug10
cms10
javascript10
docker10
bootstrap10
symfony-bundle10
laravel-mix10
testing10
distributed-tracing10
microservices-application10
laravel10
software-quality10
Programming languages (25)
Github contributions (5)
FluidTYPO3/vhs
Jul 2013 - Dec 2017
TYPO3 extension VHS: Fluid ViewHelpers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:160 commits, 104 PRs, 57 pushes in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Cedric primarily contributed to the VHS (Fluid ViewHelpers) extension, addressing code areas and adding new unit tests to ensure the reliability of the project. The contributions focused on bug fixes, such as unreachable code sections, and included the addition of comprehensive test cases for the ViewHelpers. These changes suggest a focus on code quality and testing, leading to improvements in the overall robustness of the TYPO3 extension.
fluidtypo3-cms-extensionphptyposcripttypo3-cms
instana/robot-shop
Oct 2019 - May 2022
Sample microservices application for playing with
Role in this project:Back-end & DevOps Engineer
Back-end & DevOps EngineerContributions:1 review, 57 commits, 29 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Cedric primarily contributed to the back-end infrastructure of the `robot-shop` application, focusing on the `dispatch` and `ratings` microservices. They implemented auto-profiling for the Go-based `dispatch` service and transformed the `ratings` service into a Symfony MicroKernel application. Furthermore, the user made improvements to the deployment and configuration, with commits demonstrating an understanding of service integration, instrumentation, and optimization. Their work showcases an effort to modernize the application's underlying infrastructure and integration with Instana.
spring-bootperformance-monitoringrobotdockermicroservices
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