About The Speaker
Charlie Hird is the IT Director at Shield Advanced Solutions, specializing in software development for the IBM i and Linux systems. With seven years of experience in the Nagios monitoring ecosystem, he focuses on the development of Shield’s Nagios plugin AAG and other Shield products.
At NWC, Charlie will share their practical approach to modernizing the monitoring of IBM Power systems, with a focus on IBM i environments.
Outside of work, Charlie enjoys robotics and CNC machine development. Charlie also serves in the Canadian Armed Forces Primary Reserve, bringing a disciplined, structured approach to problem-solving in his work.
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.
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
Attendees will gain practical insights into developing Nagios plugins for non-traditional platforms, avoiding common pitfalls, and successfully bringing historically siloed systems into modern monitoring workflows.
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