Nagios Most Valuable Professional

2011 MVPs

Congratulations to the 2011 Nagios MVP winners!

• Nate Broderick - Nathan Broderick is an accomplished, seasoned Networking Engineer for Nu Skin Enterprises. He was born in Provo, Utah. He has worked for 10 years as a system administrator in CentOS, Redhat, BSD, and HPUX systems. He has a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Steven Henagar's College. His hobbies are programming and studying Arabic with his free time. Nathan has two kids and a beautiful wife who keeps him sane.
  
  
• Troy Lea - Troy Lea is a self-described jack of all trades. His background is in Microsoft products starting in 1995 with DOS and Windows 3.11. From Troy:
  
  I have worked for various IT consulting companies supporting small businesses who needed IT support and have also spent some time working for a dedicated IT department in the engineering sector. In 2006 I implemented a hosted environment using VMware ESX and Windows 2003 / Exchange 2003 based on the "Microsoft Hosted Messaging And Collaboration" solution. These days everyone calls this cloud computing. This is the environment I continue to maintain and upgrade. In 2009 when looking at monitoring products for our hosted environment we came across Nagios XI. This is where I saw how flexible the product was and I started created Wizards for Nagios XI. Since then I have also created documentation, plugins and components for Nagios XI. To an administrator that is new to Nagios XI it can get a bit confusing trying to learn how to configure Nagios. You might download a plugin from the Nagios Exchange, but what is the next step? When I work out how to monitor xyz device in my environment I then am able to turn around and write a Nagios XI wizard for that xyz device. When someone downloads this wizard from the Nagios Exchange all they need to do is step through the wizard and after a few mouse clicks they are monitoring the same xyz device in their environment. This is where my passion lies in creating configuration wizards, making things easier for other administrators out there! I also enjoy a good game of darts, music festivals and social dynamics.
  
  
• Roy Arnab - Roy currently works as a senior network consultant at Khipu-Networks Ltd, UK with extensive experience in the field of Network Security, Automation and Monitoring. The company designs and sells solutions that enable to secure, audit and improve reliability of wired and wireless networks. As a senior engineer Roy is responsible for analysis of customer requirements and and designing and deploying a solution starting from setting up pre-site meetings to seeing through deployment of a solution. He builds and maintains internal company IT resources such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Apache/Tomcat Web server on Debian and Centos Linux platforms and has integrated network monitoring tools based on Nagios. Roy previously worked as a research assistant at HAW Hamburg Germany developing and tested IP address assignment protocols on the Omnet++ platform. He holds a MSc in Network Computing from University of Reading, UK and B.Sc in Electronics, University of Pune, India.
  
  
• John Murphy - John started out as a hobbyist programmer but then moved on to study Network Engineering along with CCNA and CCNP before deciding what he really wanted to do was work on server and SAN infrastructure. From John:
  
  During the final year of my degree I was given the opportunity to lead a small project team with our chosen task of designing a scalable network monitoring solution; we ended up choosing Nagios as the base. This small project directly lead to my role within Kmart Australia deploying Nagios across the business. I've now worked there for two years as the network monitoring and server scripting/tools development SME along with performing standard server admin duties largely including Linux (SLES, Red Hat, CentOS), Windows server, Active Directory and VMware ESX. I'm very happy with all the support the Nagios team and the community has provided me with over the years and I'm glad that I've been able to give something back.
  
  
• Andreas Ericsson - Andreas Ericsson is an active committer to the Nagios Core project and has volunteered his time to help improve Nagios over the past several years. According to Andreas, he "loves kids but couldn't eat a whole one himself." From Andreas:
  
  I'm a nerd in every aspect of life, so I never do anything without researching it fully. Having chosen Nagios as my monitoring daemon of choice means it's clearly the most awesome one. My spare time is currently spent working out, partying, playing poker and hanging out in front of the ps3 with my most excellent girlfriend, who generally tries to avoid household chores by attempting, and failing, to beat me in Clash of Heroes.
  
  
• Ton Voon - Ton has been writing code for the Nagios Plugins since 2002 and has retired from the team lead position in 2011. He has also been a Nagios Core committer since 2009. As he loves testing, Ton has integrated test suites into the Nagios Plugins and Nagios Core to provide automated quality assurance which helps keep the software as reliable as possible. Ton likes having battles with his kids, dancing with his wife, playing football and programming in perl, though not necessarily at the same time.
  
  
• Todd Litteken - Todd has over 16 years experience in Unix and Linux working for some of the biggest names in technology. He has been recognized for his contributions at places like NEC, Northrop Grumman, Hewlett Packard, and Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation. Over the years he has managed, architected, engineered, and constructed large deploys of Linux and Nagios at all of these companies. His ability to look at a problem from multiple points of view and to find a solution, have served him well over the years. This has been especially handy in his deployment of Nagios. Often the question of what to monitor is followed by how do we monitor that. He has often said, "For every Unix or Linux problem there are 7 good ways to solve it. The trick is knowing which one is right for this instance." To sum him up you need only realize that his first love is computer technology and it shows in both his skills and his willingness to pass his knowledge on to others.
  
  
• Matt Simmons (aka the "Standalone Sysadmin") - Matt has made numerous contributions to Nagios and the greater sysadmin community through advocacy, writing, and support. He was recently awarded the Chuck Yerkes Award at the LISA 2011 conference for his contributions to sysadmins. You can view his blog at http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog
  
  

MVP Benefits

As a way of saying thanks for all their efforts, we provide Nagios MVPs with the following:

• Free Technical Resources Access - Free access to technical resources, customer-only downloads, and self-paced training.
• Free Conference Pass - A free registration to the next Nagios World Conference North America.