Eric Loyd
COO
Everwatch Global
About Eric Loyd
Eric Loyd has been a speaker at every Nagios World Conference since 2012 and is a three-time Nagios MVP Award winner, most recently 2025. He also was a winner in the 2015 Nagios Log Server contest.
Mr. Loyd has been in IT for more than three decades, is an astrophotographer, musician, and serial entrepreneur. His experience with Nagios started in 2004 and he co-founded EverWatch Global, as a Nagios Authorized Partner and professional services provider for all things Nagios in 2015 after being inspired by that year’s Nagios World Conference.
Through his website, https://astropotamus.com, and as the host of The Star River Podcast (https://thestarriver.com), he brings astronomy and astrophotography outreach to kids, adults, and seniors through talks, star parties, and long-format conversations with astronomers, astrophysicists, and anyone else who will sit and share a drink with him on his podcast. Eric is passionate about Space and IT, and his backyard observatory, telescopes, computers, cameras, sensors, and more are all managed, monitored, and automated with Nagios as the brains of it all.
He lives near Rochester, New York with his long-time girlfriend, a 2014 Nagios World Conference speaker on using Nagios to monitor beehives, four really awesome cats, an unhealthy number of Raspberry Pis, and a SkyShed Personal Observatory Dome. Clear skies, and I’ll see you in the dark!
Sessions
When the Universe is Your Infrastructure: Orchestrating an Autonomous Observatory with Nagios XI
Come see how Nagios XI and its new native InfluxDB can be combined with Grafana, Home Assistant, Amazon Alexa, Thingino, MQTT, NINA, and more to operate a remote telescope observatory. We'll explore advanced, real-time automation tricks, pull telemetry directly from power distribution devices, track local micro-climates, and monitor space weather (including solar radiation and satellites) to calculate live hardware safety boundaries. Our journey will dive into complex configuration strategies, including dynamic time-of-day API calls, active/passive notification strategies, automated dependency locks to mute false resource alarms while a session is in progress, and deploying Nagios Mod Gearman to Raspberry Pis for bulletproof monitoring.
Finally (and maybe the coolest part) we'll discover how integrating Nagios's new InfluxDB backend with Grafana is an instant "level up" for visualizing what's going on, turning raw events into rich analytical dashboards and "Mission Control" style screens.
No astrophotography knowledge required, but you might get hooked! Weather permitting, we might even do some live astrophotography!
Summoning the Single Pane: A Live Nagios Fusion Ritual (with giveaways!)
Step into a live monitoring conjuring where a handful of humble Raspberry Pis are transformed into a unified, all-seeing observatory using Nagios Fusion. We will install, configure, and weave multiple Nagios instances together in real time, watching scattered alerts collapse into a single, coherent view—no smoke, just well-crafted telemetry. When the spell is complete, the Raspberry Pis that powered the magic will be released into the audience, enchanted, configured, and ready to continue their watch in new domains. In other words, we’ll be running a live Nagios Fusion install, configuration, and monitoring on a handful of Raspberry Pis, and then give those Pis away to audience members. This will be all “hands-on” with minimal slides and maximum fun.
See You In September!
Connect with IT professionals from around the world, gain hands-on experience, and explore the latest innovations in IT monitoring.