2013 Speakers - Nagios

Speakers List

Speakers and presentations are subject to change at any time.

Ethan Galstad: Founder @ Nagios

Ethan is the creator of Nagios from its early days as “NetSaint” in 1999. He currently serves as the President of Nagios Enterprises and is involved in development, architectural design, and various management duties.

Keynote
Knowledge Level: All
Ethan will talk about new developments and future directions for Nagios.

Ask Nagios! An Open Discussion On Future Directions and Technology
Knowledge Level: All
Both Scott Wilkerson – IT Manager at Nagios – and Ethan Galstad will answer any questions you might have related to future directions for Nagios product development.

Scott Wilkerson: IT Manager @ Nagios

Scott is the IT Manager at Nagios Enterprises. He has a degree in Computer Programming as well as almost 20 years experience in the IT industry, 12 in senior management. Away from work he enjoys vacationing with his family, hunting & fishing.

Unlocking the Power of Nagios XI Advanced Features
This presentation will go over utilizing the advanced features and capabilities in the commercial Nagios XI monitoring product, including the extensibility of the product to be customized to meet the needs of any organization. Additionally a sneek peak at some additional features coming in the 2014 release of Nagios XI.

Michael Medin: NSClient++ Developer

Michael Medin is a senior architect and open source developer and has (among other things) written NSClient++ – a popular agent for monitoring Windows based servers from Nagios. In his not-so-spare time he works as a consultant building middle ware on mainly Oracle using Java, XML and various Web Service and REST technologies. When he is not working diligently at his computer he is often found riding his mountain bike along some rocky single track in the glorious Swedish countryside.

NSClient++ – Whats New
Knowledge Level: Medium
Michael will introduce new and upcoming features of NSClient++ such as real-time log file analytic as well as real-time system monitoring. He will also introduce the new remote agent-less monitoring features as well as protocol enhancements and distributed setups.

Fernando Honig: IT Operations @ Intel Corporation

Fernando has 10 years of Linux System Administration experience. During last 2 years was working at Intel Corporation in the monitoring of web applications side. He among others started to use different tools like Nagios to monitoring the whole infrastructure. Fernando also works as a Sysadmin for different clients in Argentina, mostly newspapers web portal. He loves soccer and travel around the world.

Monitoring: How To Grow Up and Not Worry About Things
Knowledge Level: Medium
The first part of the presentation will show in deep how to enable/disable hosts, services from devices that are created automatically with Amazon EC2 auto-scaling in a cloud infrastructure. Also will show how important are the hostgroups and servicegroups and the implementation of those in a diverse kind of customers. The second part will show how can we integrate Nagvis to Nagios using mklive_status broker in order to make awesome maps and even more maps automatically. This part also will show how easy is to join different nagios systems in only one map and have the whole picture of our systems in one shoot.

David Stern: Facilities Manager @ John Hopkins Applied Physics Lab

David Stern traces his use of Nagios back to the Netsaint days. He’s set up dozens of highly tailored nagios installs within NASA and the Department of Defense over the course of the last few decades. He’s also innovated many unique plug-ins and visual apps.

The Nagios Light-Bar
Knowledge Level: Medium
This is a case study in enabling a network-attached light-bar to show the current nagios state. In addition to showing a green or red light, it creates an audible tone the first time any new alerts occur. It also allows staff to acknowledge each alert thereby indicating if there are any unacknowledged events.

Dave Williams: Technical Architect @ Bull Information Systems Ltd

I have worked for a number of computer manufacturers and software houses for over 30 years. I design and deliver IT solutions integrating networks with storage and server architectures. I have been using Nagios since my first port of NetSaint to AIX. I use EMC, NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, PowerPC, Intel and High Performance Computing in my everyday job. I have recently begun to evangalise about the Raspberry Pi micro PC system.

The All-in-One Nagios Solution
Knowledge Level: Medium
The presentation details the implementation of Nagios on a Raspberry Pi with the addition of Asterisk and other systems to deliver an all-in-one monitoring solution that fits on a VESA mount on the back of a monitor. Wireless, wired and 3G network connections are supported. A demonstration system will be part of the presentation.

Janice Singh: Web Developer @ NASA Ames/CSC

Janice Singh has been working with Nagios since 2009. In her spare time she shops for shoes, eats dark chocolate and watches football.

Visualization of Monitoring Data at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility
Knowledge Level: Medium
See how NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) used an in-house solution to display data in a completely different way. The NAS facility includes several supercomputers, archival storage systems, Lustre filesystems and NFS filesystems as an integrated system. If any one piece is down it can affect the whole facility. Therefore the visualization provided with Nagios did not meet the needs of NAS, so another layer was added to create a quick view of the system status.

Jorge Higueros: CEO @ Consulmatic

Jorge Higueros, holds a Master of Computer Security, has Security Offensive certifications, has 8 years of experience in implementations of COBIT, ISO 20000, ISO 27002, has designed a framework for enterprise risk management called SIGRE (System enterprise Risk management) currently is President CSA Central America Chapter, Marketing Director ISACA GUATEMALA CHAPTER and Chairman of Consulmatic company in the Latin American Region.

Trust Management in Monitoring Financial Critical Information Infrastructures and Policy Compliance with Nagios XI
Knowledge Level: Medium / Advanced
This presentation will cover how Nagios XI can satisfy the needs of financial IT infrastructures that are characterized by strict security requirements.

Troy Lea: IT Consultant and Nagios Developer

Self-described jack of all trades. My background is in Microsoft products starting in 1995 with DOS and Windows 3.11. My most recent venture started in 2006 when 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. In 2009 when looking at monitoring products for the hosted environment I came across Nagios XI. Currently I am taking a break from work while I relax after eight years at one company. I enjoy a good game of darts, playing Minecraft and keeping fit.

Leveraging and Understanding Performance Data and Graphs
Knowledge Level: Medium / Advanced
In the world of monitoring there is more to Nagios sending alerts because a server is about to run out of hard disk space. Collecting and storing performance data is one of the most useful features in Nagios, with this information you can get an understanding of your environment’s day to day trends. Analysing this data can be very helpful, perhaps to look at growth, or identifying performance bottlenecks. This session is about understanding how the performance data is stored in the back end and how Nagios accesses it. Topics include understanding the .rrd and .xml files; understanding how pnp generated graphs; creating custom graph templates in pnp; writing plugins that will output the performance data you want.

Yancy Ribbens: Developer @ Nagios Enterprises

Yancy is a developer at Nagios Enterprises. He holds a degree in computer networking and plans to purse further education in the area of Computer Science. While working his way through school, Yancy has nearly 5 years industry experience, providing technical support and contributing to development projects. Yancy is an avid cyclist and former cat3 racer, who enjoys long bike rides and running his favorite dog Chinook.

Windows Monitoring
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will cover topics relating to monitoring Windows environments, including Active Directory integration, and automatic deployment of agents to Windows machines.

Nick Scott: Developer @ Nagios Enterprises

Nick Scott is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He attends the University of Minnesota studying Electrical and Computer Engineering. In his free time he enjoys hacking in Python, taking things out of context and analytical number theory.

NCPA: A New Cross-Platform Monitoring Agent
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will cover NCPA – a new, cross-platform monitoring agent that can be easily deployed on Linux, Unix, Mac, and Windows machines. NCPA’s capabilities – including active and passive checks, customer plugins, remote configuration, standard protocol, and more – will be discussed in detail. Additionally, the presentation will cover how NCPA compares to other available monitoring agents.

Monitoring Network Traffic With Netflow and Nagios Network Analyzer
Knowledge Level: All
Nick will demonstrate Nagios Network Analyzer’s features, along with how it can be used to provide deep insight into network traffic.

Jake Omann: Developer @ Nagios Enterprises

Jake Omann is a developer at Nagios Enterprises. He is a recent Winona State University graduate with a degree in Computer Science. When not working or outside he likes building websites, developing web-based applications, and creating computer graphics using Photoshop.

Developing Nagios XI Components and Wizards
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will demonstrate how you can easily build components and wizards to customize and enhance the capabilities of your Nagios XI monitoring instance.

Spenser Reinhardt: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises

Spenser is a member of the Technical Support Team at Nagios Enterprises. Past positions in both large and small organizations allowed for a wide variety of technical situations and understanding. He volunteers time to do technical presentations and classes with local security groups, such as Def Con and OWASP. In his free time he enjoys sci-fi books and movies, cycling, pc gaming, and mild-mannered hackery.

Securing Your Nagios Server
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will cover best practices, methodologies, and tools for securing your Nagios server against external threats.

Intro to Network Monitoring Using Nagios Network Analyzer and NSTI
Knowledge Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Nagios Network Analyzer for collecting network flow information and determining what is using your bandwith and where it’s going! Nagios SNMP Trap Interface and how it collects and displays information from snmptt and snmptrapd, to give you an easy to understand view of traps in your network. Basic network monitoring with snmp including, basic troubleshooting, determining interface state and usage, and correlating this information with NNA and NSTI for greater overall understanding.

Andy Brist: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises

Andy is a member of the Technical Support Team at Nagios Enterprises. He is a former owner of a PC repair shop and an avid technologist. He enjoys hacking about in gentoo linux’s unstable upstream, disassembling new gear, and tinkering about with webgl and javascript. His hobbies include playing tin whistle when no one is around, swing dancing with his wife, and sophist jousting with those lacking the prudence to avoid it.

Visualizing Your Monitoring Data
Knowledge Level: All
This presentation will cover various data visualizations that are available for Nagios – including NagVis and 3-D visualizations. APIs that are available for creating your own custom visualizations will also be discussed.

Ludmil Miltchev: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises

Ludmil is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He likes Linux and Open Source, and enjoys testing software, and finding bugs.

Troubleshooting Common Issues In Nagios
Knowledge Level: Beginner
Ludmil will cover common issues that new users often run into with a new Nagios deployment. This presentation is a great resource for new users just getting started with Nagios. The presentation will be mainly focused on Nagios XI, but some aspects will also apply to Nagios Core.

Shamas Demoret: Sales Tech @ Nagios Enterprises

Shamas is a Sales Tech at Nagios Enterprises. His love of technology began at an early age, inspired by science fiction and cyberpunk books. In his free time he likes to read, draw, play PVP online games and strategy boardgames, and hone various skills.

Power Up! The Multifaceted Benefits and Capabilities of Nagios
Knowledge Level: Beginner
This presentation will provide a high-level overview of Nagios Core and Nagios XI – including product capabilities, high level concepts, and feature demonstrations. Recommend as a starting point for new users.

A Walthrough Of Nagios XI’s Features and Capabilities
Knowledge Level: All
This presentation will include a walkthrough of Nagios XI’s key features and capabilities. Recommended for new users, as well as experienced Nagios Core administrator interested in Nagios XI.

Sam Lansing: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises

Sam is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He has been a geek since he could pick up a screwdriver and open a desktop case, and is currently attending Minneapolis Community and Technical College for a portion of his Software Development degree. Most of his time aside from work is spent with one part studying, one part gaming and one part hanging out with room mates and family.

Getting Started With Nagios XI, Core, and Fusion
Knowledge Level: Beginner
This presentation will show you how to get started with monitoring using either Nagios Core or Nagios XI, as well has how to use Nagios Fusion as a central monitoring dashboard. Sam will demonstrate product installation, initial configuration and setup, as well as how to monitor you first things. Recommended for new users.

Getting Started With Nagios Incident Manager and Nagios Network Analyzer
Knowledge Level: Beginner
This presentation will show you how to get started with Nagios Incident Manager and Nagios Network Analyzer. Sam will demonstrate product installation, initial configuration and setup, as well as how to get started using each product. Recommended for new users.

Eric Stanley: Nagios Developer

Eric was first introduced to technology by a computer science class in high school. He has a degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota and currently holds a certification as a Red Hat Certified Engineer. He began his career as a software developer working first with early databases and then as an embedded software developer, writing in C. In the late 90’s he switched his emphasis to IT after having been introduced to Linux, although he maintains an active involvement in software development.

What’s New In Nagios Core 4
Knowledge Level: Intermediate / Advanced
In this presentation Eric will provide an overview of the new features and capabilities in Nagios Core 4 – including performance improvements, worker threads, and distributed monitoring.

Nagios APIs
Knowledge Level: Intermediate / Advanced
This talk will cover the various APIs that are present in both Nagios Core and Nagios XI, as well as how to leverage them to integrate monitoring data with your own applications.

Luis Contreras: Community Leader @ Nagios

Luis Contreras works as SAP Basis Netweaver Administrator. He is involved in several Opensource Organizations like: Nagios Community Leader for Dominican Republic, Latinux from Venezuela as Linux Certification Coordinator, CISL (Congreso Internacional de Software Libre) from Argentina as Ambassador for Dominican Republic for this congress and recently MongoDB Community. He has worked as System Administrator for important company as IKEA at Dominican Republic. Since 2005 he has given conferences about Linux, Nagios and Security over Linux in some universities in his country. He also offers Linux & Nagios consulting.

Case Study: Nagios in WindTelecom World
Knowledge Level: Beginner / All
This presentation will cover three success cases of Nagios implementations on WindTelecom and how Nagios XI has helped the company in saving money and time in their operations.

Sheeri Cabral: Database Administrator @ Mozilla

Sheeri K. Cabral has a masters degree in computer science specializing in databases from Brandeis University and a background in systems administration. Unstoppable as a volunteer and activist since age 14, Cabral founded and organizes the Boston, Massachusetts, USA, MySQL User Group and is the creator and co-host of OurSQL: The MySQL Database Community Podcast, available on iTunes. She was the first MySQL Oracle ACE Director, and is the founder (and current treasurer) of Technocation, Inc., a not-for-profit organization providing resources and educational grants for IT professionals. She wrote the MySQL Administratorӳ Bible and has been a technical editor for high-profile OӒeilly books such as High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition and CJ Dateӳ SQL and Relational Theory.

Alerting With MySQL and Nagios
Knowledge Level: Beginner
There are many Nagios plugins for MySQL, but this plugin optimizes statistics gathering, so that adding variable checks does not add a linear amount of database stress. This session will walk you through newly available templates for the most common variable checks so you can quickly monitor for the most frequent MySQL problems. This session will also include how to use and extend this set of Nagios plugins to more effectively monitor your MySQL instance.

Rodrigo Faria: Community Leader @ Nagios

Rodrigo Faria is a member of the Nagios community and has 15 years experience with telecommunications. He is an Independent Security Consultant and works on large telecommunications projects with Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, Checkpoint, Sonicwall, routing, ips, UTM, etc. He has worked with Nagios since version 0.99 of Nagios Core. He is from Brazil and loves soccer.

Helping Nagios Grow in Your Country – Brazil As A Test Case
Knowledge Level: Beginner
The presentation shows how the Nagios community has grown in Brazil and how I helped Nagios grow in my country with a community blog. My presentation has method with analysis number of access on website and understanding what is users need more understanding Nagios architecture and start up first setup. This presentation includes a bit about success cases with Nagios Core and NAgios XI in Brazil.

John Lowry: Security Engineer @ Hypermedia Systems

John is a security engineer for a managed hosting provider, working on a dedicated security team that monitors network security, web app security, PII, and PCI requirements. His is the sysadmin for the security team, monitoring the systems they require to get their job done as well as writing tools for better reporting and alerting of possible breaches or active attacks. John has worked in IT in a security/systems administration related capacity since 2006 and been using Nagios since day one. He has not given much to the Nagios Core project or open source in general, aside from helping other out on mailing lists and a few nagios plugins, so he also feels like he owes a lot of people beer at this conference.

Using Nagios as a Security Monitoring Framework
Knowledge Level: Medium
Good security monitoring is an extension of good basic monitoring. From a one man sysadmin shop, to a large corporation with a dedicated security team that has 24×7 staff, one needs to know what is happening on the network. From HTTP 500 error messages, to network switches being overloaded because of a virus outbreak, to IPS alerts, to syslog events that indicate an intrusion Nagios can be the service lets you know when a security event has occured. Using passive checks, snmp traps, and a bit of programming this talk will show you how to leverage Nagios as a security monitoring tool.

Pall Sigurdsson: Nagios Consultant @ Opin Kerfi

Since 2004, Pall Sigurdsson has been an open source consultant with focus on open monitoring tools and configuration management systems like puppet. Currently, Pall’s focus is on improving the Nagios community by contributing to projects such as okconfig, pynag and Adagios.

Adagios – Web Configuration Done Right
Knowledge Level: Basic/Beginner
Adagios is a Nagios addon that is designed to make Nagios management in enterprise environments easier and more efficient. It feature a web-based object configuration (with no database backend), a set of service templates, web API, and offers an alternative status/dashboard view that integrates natively with livestatus and pnp4nagios. This presentation will focus on the problem domain that adagios is trying to help with and how adagios can help enterprises reach best practices.

Thomas Dunbar: Storage/Database Coordination @ Intermountain Healthcare

Having retired early from Virginia Tech’s Oracle DBA group, which uses Nagios as their primary monitoring framework, I was recruited to help Intermountain Healthcare’s Storage team better support the DBA groups at IHC. While we use commercial monitoring tools here at IHC, the day to day work and on-call tasks of the Storage team require a flexibility and configurability not available in many tools. Given an open-source background (I’m in the Linux Credits file for early supporting work there related to TeX), I naturally looked to Nagios Core as a framework for building our specific storage monitoring resources.

Building Technology for Storage Systems Monitoring
Knowledge Level: Medium
Presentation of general principles of building technology (coherence, continuity and clarity) via particular example of monitoring various storage systems (SAN, Netapp, misc backup/recovery) specifically for the needs of on-call staff while at the same time feeding to monitoring tools that focus on upper management needs. Will also address issues re long-term manageability of the resulting Nagios framework in a high-availability environment having over 4 petabytes of storage and multiple Oracle databases over 15 terabytes in size.

Leland Lammert: Chief Scientist @ Omnitec Corporation

Dr. Lammert is a Technologist specializing in Open Source Software Chief Scientist at Omnitec Corporation. One of Omnitec’s specialties is creating Nagios systems in a multi-platform environment (Windows, Linux, Mac), using active checks.

Nagios in a Multi-Platform Environment
Knowledge Level: Medium
There are many ways to connect remote systems to Nagios, however one way provides maximum flexibility – reverse SSH tunnels. Active checks, ssh sessions for troubleshooting, as well as on demand RDP/VNC are all easily manageable with an ssh tunnel. We will show how to create manage these connections on multiple platforms, as well as examples of Nagios checks used in this environment.

Marcel Hecko: DevOps @ theregister.co.uk

Started a not-for-profit organization developing open wireless networks all around Europe during high school. Started to be interested in open source afterwards. Did consultations for banking and heavy industry in open-source technologies. Deployed and mantained one of the biggest installations of Nagios and Zabbix in Slovakia for the largest bank in Slovakia. Now a DevOps lead for theregister.co.uk news portal with the tech team based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Extending Nagios – Inputs and Outputs
Knowledge Level: Medium
How to write plugins to send monitored information into Nagios from different systems/application and non-standard sources. Examples on how to write extensions in Perl, PHP and Shell script. How to present information from Nagios for different groups of end users. Using open source presentation software ‘dashing’ to create great looking dashboards.

Eric Loyd: Founder and CEO @ Bitnetix

Eric Loyd is the founder and CEO of Bitnetix Incorporated, an IT consulting and systems integration company located in Rochester, New York. Bitnetix has been providing VoIP service to small businesses and non-profits since 2007. In 2012, Bitnetix formed SmartVox and re-designed their global VoIP service offering to take advantage of the AWS platform. Mr. Loyd presented Ԏagios Implementation Case: Eastman KodakԠat Nagios World 2012. He has over 25 years of IT experience, 10 years in senior management, and is a musician, photographer, amateur astronomer, and aspiring serial entrepreneur.

Nagios, AWS, and Hosted VoIP Or, Ԉow to automatically scale your platform to match your demandԦlt;/strong>
Knowledge Level: Advanced/Expert
SmartVox٠provides hosted Voice over IP (VoIP) services to small business and non-profit customers in the US and abroad by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual servers, storage, and databases. Each customer gets their own dedicated, private AWS server. WeӬl look at how SmartVox implements Nagios to dynamically adjust this platform to Բight sizeԠitself to current demands of customers and why it makes sense to scale VoIP services in near-real time.

From Ԃare [Virtual] MetalԠto Nagios Core on Amazon Web Services
Knowledge Level: Basic/Beginner
WeӬl start with a brand new Amazon Web Service EC2 virtual instance and actually install Nagios core, do some basic configuration and security hardening, install check_mk, and then have it monitor something. All right there, live, at the conference.

William Leibzon: Open Source Consultant

William is an open-source consultant who has contributed to Nagios Core and has been developing plugins and addons to nagios for the last 10 years. He has helped to setup monitoring and systems architecture for many companies and currently helps part-time as a cloud systems architect at online gaming startup. He is also pursuing PhD degree at the University of California where his research interests include parallel and distributed computing, games theory, graph theory, cognitive science and systems modeling in social science, He enjoys hiking and camping and does archaeology work as a hobby in the summer.

SNMP Monitoring Architecture with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
SNMP is sometimes feared for being not-so-simple monitoring protocol. But as a standard it has proven its worth many times and is the main way to monitor network equipment as well as supported by all operating systems. I will first discuss SNMP protocol, its data structures and its security features. Then we will discuss how to use Nagios with existing SNMP plugins and how to write new SNMP plugins in Perl while optimizing SNMP requests to minimize check completion time. This presentation is aimed for those using Nagios in linux or other unix environment and where standard Net-SNMP tolls and libraries are available.

BoF Session: Nagios Plugin Thresholds
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
This is to be a discussion session to get feedback from nagios users and developers on proposed Nagios Plugins Threshold Specification: https://github.com/willixix/nagios-plugins/wiki/New-Threshold-Syntax. Plus also in general to get feedback on what people may want to see as far as standardization effort on nagios plugins syntax or any features that people would like all plugins to support. The session is to be kind of similar to IETF BoF sessions. I’ll lead the session as I’m the one requesting and will ask for volunteer to write a summary for nagios-plugins mail list.

James Clark: Systems Monitoring Administrator @ Big Apparel Company

I have been in the IT industry for 22+ years and have been using Nagios for the past 10. I used XI during the final few years at my last job and quickly got it purchased when I was hired as the Systems Monitoring Administrator at a large apparel company.

Integrating On-Call Schedules with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
This presentation will demonstrate how the team at the large retail company I work at integrated the data from our on-call information with Nagios. This integration affects who is alerted for host and service issues.

Arup Chakrabarti: Operations Engineering Team Lead @ PagerDuty

Arup has been working in the space of software operations since 2007. He started out at as an Operations Engineer at Amazon, helping to reduce customer defects with multiple teams for the Amazon Marketplace. Since then, he has managed and built operations teams at Amazon and Netflix to help improve availability and reliability. He currently works at PagerDuty, where he is the Operations Engineering Team Lead.

What you should Monitor and Alert on in a Production System
Knowledge Level: Medium
With more and more data being churned out by all of our monitoring tools, it is tempting to look at every graph on every system. In this talk, we will go through why that is a bad idea and some of the strategies you can use to filter out useful metrics that are actionable.

Daniel Wittenberg: Manager IT R&D Monitoring @ IPsoft

Dan has been a Unix/Linux admin for over 18 years and a Netsaint / Nagios user for almost 12 of those. Having worked as a consultant in many industries has given him a broad range of monitoring expertise. He has written many custom plugins and event brokers and also contributed patches and updates to many others. He is also an avid open source promoter and uses it whenever possible. Having managed environments for fortune 50 companies and ones with over 600 Nagios servers and over a million service checks has given him a unique perspective on scaling and integration.

Scaling Nagios Core 4.x
Knowledge Level: Advanced/Expert
We’ll cover a brief overview of the Nagios Core 3.x scaling items that I’ve learned from previous years and then review what has changed with Nagios Core 4.x and how migrating to Nagios Core 4 can help with performance and integration.

Rodrigue Chakode: Research Engineer @ SysFera

Rodrigue Chakode holds a PhD in computing science. Before his PhD, he worked in an consulting company integrating IT monitoring and backup solutions for data centers. Strong supporter of free software and passionate with open source monitoring, he started in 2010 writing the first lines of the software that has become RealOpInsight. Currently, he work as Research Engineer for a company providing open source software for distributed computing and cloud computing.

Effective Monitoring for Demanding Operations Environments
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
In today’s IT infrastructures, there is increasingly a large number of hardware and software components to monitor. To be effective, it is important for administrators to quickly assess the real impact of incidents. Hence administrators need to avoid/limit false alerts. Additionally, when incidents arise, they should quickly evaluate their impacts so to be able to prioritize the recovery from incidents that have higher impacts on services. That are crucial points that need to be addressed in demanding operations environments. In this talk, we will present how to achieve this purpose by focusing on high level services (business processes, services provided to end-users), instead of on individual checks. Our explanation will be guided by examples set up on top of Nagios thanks to RealOpInsight . Business process-centric, RealOpInsight enables the network administrators to focus on useful alerts. Indeed, thanks to its high-level hierarchical organization of services along with advanced rules and algorithms to aggregate and propagate incidents, they are able to handle the severities of incidents in a fine-grained way.

Mike Weber: Lead Trainer and President @ Cybermontana Inc.

Mike Weber provides the Official Nagios Training, Basic and Advanced classes for Nagios. Cybermontana Inc. (spidertools.com) is a Nagios Training Partner and also provides training for CentOS, Ubuntu and Postfix mail servers since 1999.

Leveraging SNMP Extensions with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
The MIB for SNMP extension is NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB which can be used as an agentless option for monitoring. This MIB will provide the option to query commands or shell scripts for metrics that are created from the scripts. Basically what this allows is that SNMP can be used to execute any scripts on the remote host to use for monitoring and replace other options like NRPE which require an agent. Practical examples on how to use extend scripts for Nagios monitoring and for event handlers will be shown in the session.

Distributed Monitoring with Raspberry Pi
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
The Raspberry Pi (Model B) is a 700Mhz; 512Mb RAM ARM-based machine that has enough resources to perform monitoring tasks for Nagios. This presentation will demonstrate how to set up a Raspberry Pi, a $35 server, using a distributed model. The distributed model is built upon Mod-Gearman to harness the total potential of the Raspberry Pi. A working model will be presented.

Avleen Vig: Staff Operations Engineer @ Etsy

Avleen is a Staff Operations Engineer at Etsy, where he spends much of his time growing the infrastructure for selling knitted gloves and cross-stitch periodic tables. Before joining Etsy he worked at several large tech companies, including EarthLink and Google, as well as a number of small successful startups.

Nagios at Etsy: How a Handmade Marketplace Grew its Monitoring with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
Over the last 5 years at Etsy, we invested heavily in using Nagios as its primary monitoring system. As our systems grew in number and complexity, we found a number of traditional monitoring methodologies breaking down. In this talk you will learn about how we scaled our monitoring, the practices we use to reduce alert fatigue, increase visibility and bring in data from multiple sources into one monitoring system.

Nicolas Brousse: Director of Operations Engineering @ TubeMogul

Nicolas is Director of Operations Engineering at Tubemogul. He worked for the past 12 years in many industry leading french start-up. From web hosting to online video services like Multimania, Lycos, Kewego. Nicolas gained experienced working with heavy traffic and large user databases. By joining Tubemogul – a Brand-Focused Video Marketing Company – he helped growing the infrastructure from 20 servers to over 800 servers and handle over 10 billions HTTP requests per day.

Bringing Business Awareness to Your Operation Team
Knowledge Level: Basic
Managing an infrastructure with a global footprint can be a challenging task for a centralized operation team. Bringing business awareness to your operation is key to success. In this talk you will learn how TubeMogul Operation Team easily manage its on-call rotation, how we centralize monitoring information from multiple datacenter for efficient on-call and how we define our business priority with a business focused dashboard.

John Sellens: System Administrator and Developer

John Sellens has been a system administrator for over 25 years, and has been teaching tutorials on Nagios and monitoring since 2001. He has implemented Nagios in many different environments over the years, and has created or “improved” more plugins and related tools than he can remember. He is the developer of the MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance, and is a member of the IT/Operations team at FreshBooks in Toronto.

Monitoring Remote Locations with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
Monitoring a single, connected network is straightforward. When you need to monitor various locations, with different access and connectivity challenges, things get a little more complicated. This talk will cover the various methods that can be used to monitor hosts and services in remote locations, whether or not they are under your direct control, using techniques and tools such as SSH Tunnels, NRPE, NRDP, and reflection. This talk will cover both generic approaches for remote monitoring, and how these methods are implemented in the MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance.