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Icinga Camp Berlin | A few Tickets left!

Icinga Camp Berlin 2023 is just around the corner and we can’t wait to finally welcome you!

 

What’s Awaiting You

The one-day event is set to take place on May 17th in the beautiful Palais Kulturbrauerei. We are proud of our line-up with awesome speakers that are ready to share their best practices with Icinga.

Here’s a little spoiler regarding our talks:

  • Current State of IcingaBernd Erk
  • Upgrading Incident Management with IcingaJohannes Meyer & Julian Brost

  • Sneak Peak: Icinga for KubernetesEric Lippmann

Take a look at the full program and convince yourself!

 

Last Call for Tickets

You’d like to exchange ideas face to face with our Icinga developers? Then Icinga Camp Berlin is the perfect spot for you!

We’re not sold out yet! Grab one of our last available tickets now, save your seat and look forward to joining a community event you will remember!

Katja Kotschenreuther
Katja Kotschenreuther
Manager Marketing

Katja ist seit Oktober 2020 Teil des Marketing Teams. Als Manager Marketing kümmert sie sich hauptsächlich um das Marketing für die Konferenzen stackconf und OSMC sowie unsere Trainings. Zudem unterstützt sie das Icinga Team mit verschiedenen Social Media Kampagnen und der Bewerbung der Icinga Camps. Sie ist SEO-Verantwortliche für all unsere Websites und sehr viel in unserem Blog unterwegs. In ihrer Freizeit reist sie gerne, bastelt, backt und engagiert sich bei Foodsharing. Im Sommer kümmert sie sich außerdem um ihren viel zu großen Gemüseanbau.

OSMC 2022 | Recap Day 3

The third and last day of the OSMC 2022 has come to an end. Once again it looks like there is not enough time for all the talks be heard and all the conversations to be had. But waiting until everyone is bored would likely be worse. I visited some of the talks of this day, which I would like to mention. This is, by no means, a testimony to the quality or ingenuity of those or other talks, I haven’t seen, but rather a consequence of personal interest and limited time. Here is what I learned:

In 60 Minuten zum IoT Projekt auf der Basis von ThingsBoard

The biggest german railway company, the Deutsche Bahn, is, as are probably most railway companies, not know for the quick adaption of new trends or their cutting edge technology. This is in many cases, not the worst thing, since this lets the technologies hypes die down until they do something actually useful. Transporting people and cargo across great distances at high speed is not a field for ill-conceived
expermentation.

Nonetheless at some point, newer technological developments carry the possibility of improving the current situation. And the increasing maturity of IoT (“Internet of Things”) things led to an interest in the possibilities in the big world of managing a railway infrastructure. The amount of mobile and non mobile machinery and other assets is stunning and the maintenance or even keeping inventory is a rather complex task.

The increase of availability and ease of use of small sensor and networking devices can help here to create a more accurate picture of the individual systems. An example for this, mentioned in the talk by Holger Koch from DB Systel, is the observation of the amount of dust in the air in switch systems which are using electric relays. Measuring the amount of dust in the air allows a prediction of the need for maintenance to avoid errors. Complementary, unnecessary maintenance cycles can be avoided.

Many maintenance processes are on a fixed schedule and done to a specification which was developed at one point in time and is probably rather conservative. Acquisition of fine granular, new data could allow to analyze and improve those processes.

Holger presented here his experimental setup, which he uses to develop and discover these technologies. A collection of tried and tested components and a platform called ThingsBoard gives a stable basis, which takes care of a lot of the basic components like communications and the integration of and in other platforms. The platform uses some kind of open core model and should cover the use cases of most people in most situations.

Intermission – The Ignite Talks

The Ignite talks are, with their duration of only five minutes, easy to appreciate. The short duration forces the speakers to provide only a broad overview, which might interest even people foreign to the topic or very short little things, which might help for a specific problem. After a delicious lunch we’ve had the pleasure to listen to the Ignites „The O11y toolkit“ given by Julien Pivotto and „Event Driven Ansible“ by Sebastian Gumprich.

The O11y toolkit

The O11y toolkit is a practical toolkit for using Prometheus to make usage easier for people who prefer WebUI and APIs.

Event Driven Ansible

Ansible is push based, but what if one could let it trigger automatically based on some event. There is a way now and here one got a
short introduction into Event Driven Ansible.

Thruk3 – A Fresh Look

Sven Nierlein presented the newest version of the Thruk web interface to a crowd of happy users (or at least interested people). Thruk bundles multiple monitoring systems with the same interface together to present the user a unified interface. The main focus of the new version is mostly a revised look and feel. Some usage patterns and styles currently present in the web were differing increasingly from what Thruk presented before and while users were quite happy with the functionality, the interface was, to use a quote here, “ugly”.

The new interface looks quite modern and reworking it, was a chance taken to make the usage more intuitive and add some little changes to present better, more and|or better information or remove some unnecessary hurdles. For example, the introduction of a “copy to clipboard” button was not a huge change, but removes unnecessary time used for selecting and copying text and also the small error potential of not selecting correctly. So, a lot of “quality of life” fixes were introduced and can now be used, since the update is released and ready
for the rollout.

While this years OSMC has come to an end, I am already looking forward to next year! If you are interested in any of the above mentioned talks or would like to know what other talks were presented: Our conference Archives with all the recordings, slides and pictures will be released soon. Stay tuned!

Lorenz Kästle
Lorenz Kästle
Consultant

Lorenz hat seinen Bachelor der Informatik an der FAU gemacht und sich zuletzt mit Betriebssystemen dort beschäftigt. In seiner Freizeit beschäftigt er sich ein wenig mit XMPP und der Programmiersprache Erlang.

OSMC 2022 | Recap Day 2

Today I have the pleasure to recap our second OSMC conference day and thus the many great talks of our wonderful speakers! I started my OSMC day with the initial talk of the day after meeting and greeting colleagues and customers alike. OSMC is always a good opportunity not only to catch up with latest developments and monitoring trends but also to catch up with people.

Our CEO Bernd Erk kicked off the day with a dazzling small welcome and introduction also introducing our Gold sponsors. Our two main sponsors SearchGuard and OpenNMS this year had the opportunity to get on stage and say a few words themselves. They greeted us with a warm welcome and invited the attendees over to their booths.

No need for me to change the conference room afterwards, since Christian Stein’s talk about Icinga for Windows, that I wanted to attend, was in the same room. Here i could also say „Hello“ to the team from Telekom – Hans and Lars – Greetings to you two again!

Icinga for Windows in the Monitoring of Madness

Christian from the NETWAYS Sales Department and Icinga Developer presented his Icinga for Windows framework. He shared what’s new and why he came up with the idea of the framework at all. Christian’s initial idea was to give Icinga users a framework for developing their own plugins which they need for their Windows monitoring. He also wanted to provide a daemon which takes care of running it on a schedule. His other goal, to enable customers to do visualization and customize it to a certain degree, he explained with an example from the business process module and a detailed tree view of a check result.

Furthermore, he pointed out the difficulties with the different versions of Powershell and that the same Powershell calls differ in usage between Windows versions. He is creating a baseline for development with Windows 2012 R2 as the lowest version. As a more in-depth example, he explained the legacy behaviour of an Icinga for Windows plugin with different versions. He asked the audience for urgently needed feedback on false positives. I really like Christian’s live demo! But I was also impressed of him being so well prepared that he had the hands-on example explained on a simple slide as well in case the demo wouldn’t have worked. Christian really caught us, I’ve seldomly seen such a focused audience.

Christian closed his talk with with a small preview of the upcoming version 1.10.1 of Icinga for Windows, before he answered a lot of questions from the audience. I then changed the venue and headed over to the other room for the talk from Hila Fish, grabbing a coffee on the way.

Open Source: Open Choice – A DevOps Guide for OSS Adoption

Hila Fish, Senior DevOps Engineer at Wix, began her talk with her thoughts about the balance between keeping the working environment or breaking it with an update. She took the example of the EOL of the Centos Operating System through RedHat which had no Open Source replacement at that time. She took this as an example for an advantage as well as disadvangates in Open Source.

The possible disadvantages she sees in Open Source are: 1. Security by obscurity (not everybody can read code or interpret it), 2. Prone to abuse (everybody can fork this project or create a malicious one), 3. Compliance, 4. Not always entirely free (even Open Source software comes with costs – support or training), 5. Discontinued product (not maintained anymore).

Also she advised to find out if the OSS Project has a roadmap to check if it will be still free in the future. She pointed out that OSS is still dependend on participation and how you can and should engage in Open Source. Even without writing code there are many ways you can contribute to it – contributions, talks, discussions, donations. Hila ended her talk apologizing for the cough’s. No need to! Get well soon, Hila, from the whole NETWAYS team!

In the break I talked with some colleagues from Austria over a specific problem they encounter with Icinga 2 and how we might tackle it.
Refilled my coffee and then joined the audience for some vSphere input.

VMware Monitoring with Ease

Thomas Gelf who is working in the NETWAYS Professional Services Department kicked off his talk with some insights in his life: mainly he is making music, playing chess and spending time with his kids. At nights he is coding. He made a small poll with the audience how many people are running VMware in their company and how many are running EXSi without vcenter for development reasons.

He then took us to a small history of the VMware module, where it all started and where we are now in the year 2022. He was especially proud of the GitHub engagement from the users with the vSphere module. Thomas showed us new module interface changes in the actual vSphereDB version and what will come next.

A question of a person in the audience immediately led Thomas to showing his answer in a live demo. In that demo he created a new pull request for the Icinga for Windows framework. That was followed by a demo that showed how to import hosts from a VCenter through the Icinga Director and vSphereDB module integration. After Thomas‘ talk it was time for lunch. I enjoyed a very delicious meal, and said „hello“ to various customers before Bernd rang the bell for the Ignite Talks.

Talks that Ignite New Ideas

Anne Geetha started with a very very fast introduction how to setup and integrating Confluent with Prometheus and Grafana.
It was very nice because of the speedup in the talk during the automated slide switching, so it was very fun to watch as the speakers also had to speed up with their talks. Anne was followed by Daniel Bodky who described his struggles with YAML in „That’s nuts! A proof of concept of Icinga 2 on Kubernetes using Acorn„. Daniel also started right from the bat with a speedy introduction of Acorn and the usage of K8s and Acorn. The third and last one of the Ignite speakers was Philipp Krenn who talked about „How to benchmark – poorly“ , with a great comic strip „benchmarking“ a squid with a house cat. Thanks! Laughed very hard.

My next upcoming talk was from Jonah Kowall.

Unifying Observability: Weaving Prometheus, Jaeger, and Open Source Together

Jonah made an initial point about a big license shift in the Open Source community. Prometheus, Jaeger and Grafana spent some time to make sure that no contamination of source code through those license changes took place. Jonah then talked about OpenSearch and its dashboards (a Kibana fork) and how it is the base for observability. He introduced us to the new feature PromQL support. With this you can query PromQL sources directly from OpenSeach dashboards. Also he showed an early prototype of OpenSearch dashboard plugin for observability before he dived into Jaeger UI and OpenTelemetry. He also advised strongly to follow projects which operate on the Apache 2 License because it is the most unproblematic one. This was in my humble opinion the most important topic today because it touched on the still ongoing licensing issues which occur in the industry at the moment.

The Current State of Icinga

After that I sat down with some customers to discuss and solved some ticket issues and joined afterwards the Current State of Icinga talk of Icinga CEO Bernd Erk. He really tried to convince us to use the Icinga DB in production. Icinga DB has been released this June. Bernd gave us the whole show of annual updates for the Icinga modules. He also dropped some interesting news like the one that the next Icinga Camp Berlin will take place in May 2023. Bernd really tried not to overreach his time schedule, and reached it on spot. Reminding us in the end to gather later to go to the OSMC evening event at the modern event location KORN’S.

As every year Bernd’s presentation is the most entertaining and most interactive with many questions for the audience. You can really tell that he cares for the interaction with the users and customers.

From those talks during the day my personal top three would be Bernd ErkCurrent State of Icinga at place #1, followed by Thomas GelfVMware Monitoring with ease and finally at third place all Ignite Talks which tried to press the most entertaining information in their tiny timeslots. Thanks Anne, Daniel and Philipp for those enteraining bits!

This was my wrap up of the day. I hope you enjoyed it! Now I am looking forward to the evening event and more talks and fun tomorrow! To get a few impressions of the second OSMC day I have prepared a slider with lots of awesome pictures. Enjoy! 😄

With friendly regards, David from the OSMC

 

David Okon
David Okon
Senior Systems Engineer

Weltenbummler David hat aus Berlin fast den direkten Weg zu uns nach Nürnberg genommen. Bevor er hier anheuerte, gab es einen kleinen Schlenker nach Irland, England, Frankreich und in die Niederlande. Alles nur, damit er sein Know How als IHK Geprüfter DOSenöffner so sehr vertiefen konnte, dass er vom Apple Consultant den Sprung in unser Professional Services-Team wagen konnte. Er ist stolzer Papa eines Sohnemanns und bei uns mit der Mission unterwegs, unsere Kunden zu glücklichen Menschen zu machen.

OSMC 2022 | Check out our conference program

Experience the full spectrum of open source monitoring when representatives from well-known international companies share their deep expertise from November 14 – 16, 2022 at OSMC. Among them are Geetha Anne (Confluent), Emil-Andreas Siemes (Grafana Labs), Nancy Gariché (GitHub Security Lab), Dotan Horowits (Logz.io), Olena Kharchenko (Novatec Consulting), George Hantzaras (Citrix Systems), Hila Fish (Wix), and Christian Lorenz (Datev), and many more!

An agenda full of insights and inspiration

With a total of 34 talks, the agenda will sum up the current state of the art in open source monitoring and give an outlook on future trends and perspectives. Learn which monitoring and observability solutions are available and how they can best be integrated with other tools! The conference program is complemented by four hands-on workshops on Kubernetes, Prometheus, GitLab, and Icinga Director. Round off your conference participation with a pre-conference training on the first day.

OSMC stands out because of its great community that has developed over the past 15 years. Networking, socializing and getting in contact with 300 like-minded attendees is one of its core values. Our famous and fabulous evening event will make OSMC for sure a great experience. Meet the coolest community, get the best inspiration and experience maximum interaction!

Check out the full schedule now and secure your Open Source Monitoring Conference ticket!

Monthly Snap May 2022

Another month filled with interesting articles is over. Here are the links for you in case you missed some of them!

Let´s begin with the tech- part

 

What is a Graylog Sidecar? Nicole made us curious for more knowledge on Graylog. And Christoph told us how to replicate data in So repliziert man Daten mit InfluxDB. Then Björn wrote another article on HUGO. This time on the GitLab CI/CD- Pipeline für eine statische Website. And, finally, part three in Daniels Blog series on OpenSearch is online, this part is about how to manage your data.

 

Icinga Camp in Berlin

 

Jessica reminded us of the Icinga Camp in Berlin in July, and let us know that the program is set. Check out the top speakers!

 

NETWAYS Web Services

 

Stefan told us what is so great about the Messenger App Rocket Chat. (And yes, of course we use it @netways). Then Gabriel wrote about Network Links between OpenStack and Kubernetes Projects and their advantages. And Daniel talked about security issues at the virtual conference DockerCon 2022: Wie geht Containersecurity? And, finally, Sebastian presented the NETWAYS Managed Database! A great addition to our managed services.

 

#lifeatnetways

 

Congratulations Achim on 10 years at NETWAYS! Katja interviewed him for the occasion in our blog-series NETWAYS- anniversaries. And Marc gave us the report from the apprentices` project week. Then Leonie shared her review after 3 years as an apprentice. (Spoiler alert: She highly recommends NETWAYS!)

 

 

Our Ukrainian guests 

 

Bernd wanted to do something to help Ukrainian refugees, and he was the driving force to make it happen: we created a shelter for two families from Ukraine in a separate building where we usually hold our trainings. Read about it in Unsere ukrainischen Gäste im Kesselhaus.

 

OSMC

 

Katja reported that the call for Papers is open. Submit your proposal and be a part of this great event! In her glimpses into the archives from last years` conference you can watch the entire talks from 2021– which might help tide you over until November is finally here. Here is a link to Bernd Erks` talk about The current state of Icinga. Also enjoy Philip Krenn`s talk Observability is More than Logs, Metrics and Traces and Lennart`s talk Icinga Installer – Der einfache Weg zum eigenen Icinga

 

(The return of the) DevOpsDays!

 

Katja spread the happy news, that the DevOpsDays will take place again this year! Join us in Berlin in September! The tickets are now available, and the Call for Papers is open. Of course, you can also reap the benefits of becoming a sponsor.

 

NETWAYS Shop

 

Isi told us of the advantages of leaving a review on our shop-Website! Read about how to get your discount voucher for your next order.

Header photo by Andrew Constant

 

 

Catharina Celikel
Catharina Celikel
Office Manager

Catharina unterstützt seit März 2016 unsere Abteilung Finance & Administration. Die gebürtige Norwegerin ist Fremdsprachenkorrespondentin für Englisch. Als Office Manager kümmert sie sich deshalb nicht nur um das Tagesgeschäft sondern übernimmt nebenbei zusätzlich einen Großteil der Übersetzungen. Privat ist der bekennende Bücherwurm am liebsten mit dem Fahrrad unterwegs.