About The Speaker
John Shorey is a Lead Monitoring and Security Systems Engineer on the Enterprise Monitoring Services team within the Office of Information Technology at Princeton University. He has over 30 years of experience in higher‑education IT, including desktop support, large‑scale Windows systems administration, and enterprise monitoring.
John joined Princeton’s Enterprise Monitoring Team eight years ago, where he supports campus partners and OIT teams using Nagios XI and other monitoring tools. His interest in this session topic grew from firsthand experience delivering custom monitoring checks when suitable plugins were unavailable and development resources were limited. He now focuses on using AI responsibly and pragmatically to help bridge skills gaps and enable reliable, production‑ready monitoring.
Struggling to Write Custom Plugins? How AI Can Bridge the Gap
Many Nagios environments rely on custom plugins to monitor modern systems, yet suitable existing plugins are often outdated, incomplete, or unavailable. For administrators who are not full‑time developers and lack access to dedicated development resources, creating custom checks can become a major challenge.
The presentation includes a real-world example of building a custom check, highlighting how assumptions were challenged by real system output and how issues were identified and corrected, providing attendees with realistic, production-focused lessons they can apply in their own environments.
What I Hope You Learn
This session demonstrates a practical, repeatable approach for using AI as a collaborative tool to design, refine, and validate custom Nagios plugins. Attendees will learn how AI can help translate real monitoring requirements into usable checks while maintaining trust, accuracy, and long‑term maintainability through proper guardrails and validation.
Sign up to get the latest on #NWC2026 speakers, sessions, and registration announcements.
