About The Speaker
Surviving IT: My career has been peppered with long roles, and short contracts. I’ve always enjoyed IT because, save for support roles, I typically don’t have contact with people outside the organization, which is something I was deathly afraid of. In 2019, I started a new job at a great company full of wonderful people. Two weeks later, my wife left me. Having spent nearly 20 years in IT (and a hell of a lot more than that working with computers at home), it struck me that maybe continuing to do what I’ve been most comfortable doing isn’t actually what I should be doing. So when Josh Manley came and asked me to be the sole technical sales engineer at Nagios, to be on the phone and interacting specifically with people who are not part of the company, I said, “Sure.”
Nagios Monitoring and the IBM i
IBM i remains a critical platform in many enterprises, yet monitoring it with modern tools like Nagios presents unique challenges. Our session would walk through our journey of building a Nagios plugin specifically for IBM i, starting with no prior Nagios experience and ending with a fully integrated solution for both Nagios Core and Nagios XI. We begin with a brief overview of what IBM i is and why it differs fundamentally from typical Linux and Windows systems, including challenges such as EBCDIC encoding, non-standard interfaces, and platform-specific operational risks. We’ll discuss key architectural decisions, including why we chose C over Java for performance and control, and how rethinking our connection/communication approach was essential to safe, efficient, scalable monitoring. The talk then follows our evolution from learning Nagios Core and developing custom check commands, to maintaining our own Linux-based Nagios stack enhanced with open-source components and ultimately working directly with Nagios XI by developing configuration wizards to simplify deployment. Finally, we’ll cover how this foundation allowed us to expand monitoring to additional IBM Power components, including VIOS and HMC. Attendees will gain practical insights into developing Nagios plugins for non-traditional platforms, avoiding common pitfalls, and successfully bringing legacy systems into modern monitoring workflows.
Behind the Session Title
Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied: Stories from my past, and how I’ve applied them later in life, often during technical demos. Turns out, working as a jack-of-all-trades kind of role in IT will let you speak somewhat intelligently to a wide range of audiences. Some stories are about taking what I know, and expanding on that knowledge on the fly, during a demo. Some are just stories I like to share because I’d like to see change in how IT is handled.
What I Hope You Learn
Why Attend: Come to hear stories about personal growth and building trust on calls with prospective clients, stay for the dad jokes and hot takes about IT.
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