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OSMC 2018 – Day 2

The evening event was again great food, drinks and conversation and while it ended in the early morning for some people, rooms were full of attendees again for the first talk. It was a hard choice between probably great talks but in the end I had chosen Rodrigue Chakode with „Make IT monitoring ready for cloud-native systems„. Being a long-term contributor to several Open Source Monitoring he used his experience to develop Realopinsight as a tool bringing existing monitoring tools together and extending them for monitoring cloud-native application platforms. In his live demo he showed the webinterface and Icinga 2, Zabbix and Kubernetes integration including aggregation of the severity for a specific service across the different solutions.
OSMC 2018
Scoring a Technical Cyber Defense Exercise with Nagios and Selenium“ by Mauno Pihelgas was a quite uncommon case study. Locked Shields is the biggest Cyber Defense exercise involving 22 teams defending systems provided by vendors against hundreds of attacks. Mauno is responsible for the availability scoring system which gives the defending teams bonus points for availability of the systems, but of course it makes also available for attacks which if successful will cause loss of points. The data collected by Nagios and Selenium are then forwarded to Kafka and Elasticsearch to provide abuse control and overall scoring. To give you some numbers over the 2 days of the exercise about 34 million checks are executed and logged.
Susanne Greiner’s talk „Mit KI zu mehr Automatisierung bei der Fehleranalyse“ was on using Artificial Intelligence for automatic failure analyses. Her talk started from anomaly detection and forecasting, went through user experience and ended with machine learning and deep learning. It is always great to see what experts can do with data, so running anomaly detection and forecasting on the data, adding labels for user experience and feeding them to the AI can increase troubleshooting capabilities. And better troubleshooting will result in better availability and user experience of course what perhaps is the main goal of all IT.
At the evening event there was again some gambling and after lunch the guys how managed to win the most chips won some real prices.
OSMC 2018 Gambling Winners
While some still enjoyed the event massage, Carsten Köbke started the afternoon sessions with the best talk title „Katzeninhalt mit ein wenig Einhornmagie“ (Cat content with a little bit of unicorn magic). Being the author of the Icinga Web 2 module for Grafana and several themes for Icinga Web 2 he demonstrated and explained his work to the audience. It is very nice to see performance data with annotations extracted from the Icinga database nicely presented in Grafana. The themes part of the talk was based on the idea of every one can do this and monitoring can be fun.
Thomas and Daniel teamed up to focus on log management and help people on choosing their tool wisely in their talk „Fokus Log-Management: Wähle dein Werkzeug weise„. They compared the Elastic stack and Graylog with each other in multiple categories, showing up advantages and disadvantages and which tool fits best for which user group.
Eliminating Alerts or ‚Operation Forest‘“ by Rihards Olups was a great talk on how he tried reducing alerts to get a better acceptance and handling of the remaining alerts, getting problems solved instead of ignored. The ‚Operation forest‘ mentioned in the talk’s title is his synonym for there infrastructure and alerts are trash he does not like in his forest, because trash attracts trash, like alerts attract alerts because if the numbers grows they tend to be ignored and more problems will get critical causing more alerts. It is not a problem of the tool used for monitoring and alerting but he had not only nice hints on changing culture but also technical ones like focusing on one monitoring solution, knowing and using all features or making problems more recognizable like putting them into the message of the day. For those having the same problems in their environment he wrote a shitlist you can check the problems you have and the number of checked items will indicate how shitty your environment is, I recommend having a look at this list.
Last but not least Nicolai Buchwitz talked about the „Visualization of your distributed infrastructure“ and with his Map module for Icinga Web 2 he is providing a very powerful tool to visualize it. All the new features you get from the latest 1.1.0 release make it even more useful and the outlook on future extensions looks promising. Nicolai concluded with a nice live demo showing all this functionality.
So it was again a great conference, thanks to all speakers, attendees and sponsors for making this possible. I wish everyone not staying for the hackathon or Open Source camp „Save travels“. Slides, videos and pictures will be online in the near future. I hope to see you on next year’s OSMC on November, 4th – 7th!

Dirk Götz
Dirk Götz
Principal Consultant

Dirk ist Red Hat Spezialist und arbeitet bei NETWAYS im Bereich Consulting für Icinga, Puppet, Ansible, Foreman und andere Systems-Management-Lösungen. Früher war er bei einem Träger der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung als Senior Administrator beschäftigt und auch für die Ausbildung der Azubis verantwortlich wie nun bei NETWAYS.

OSMC 2018 – Day 1

It is always the same, Winter is coming and it brings people to Nuremberg for OSMC. Our Open Source Monitoring conference still grows every year and after giving three parallel tracks a try last year, we changed format again to include also shorter talks and having always three tracks. It also gets more international and topics get more diverse, covering all different monitoring solutions with speakers (and attendees) from all over the worlds. Like every year also the 13th conference started with a day of workshops enabling the interested ones to get hands on Prometheus, Ansible, Graylog and practical example on using the Puppet modules for Icinga 2. Also this year two days of great talks will be followed by a day of hacking and the second issue of the Open Source Camp takes place, this time focusing on Puppet.
OSMC 2018
And another tradition is Bernd starting the conference with a warm welcome before the first talk. Afterwards Michael Medin talked about his journey in monitoring and being a speaker at OSMC for the eleventh time in „10 years of OSMC: Why does my monitoring still look the same?„. It was a very entertaining talk comparing general innovation with the one happening in monitoring. He was showing up that monitoring solutions changed to reflect the change in culture but still stayed the same mechanism and explained all the problems we probably know like finding the correct metrics and interpreting them resulting from this.
Second talk I attended was „Scaling Icinga2 with many heterogeneous projects – and still preserving configurability“ by Max Rosin. He started with the technical debt to solve and requirements to fulfill when migrating from Icinga 1 to Icinga 2 like check latency or 100% automation of the configuration. Their high-available production environment had no outage since going live in January, because the infrastructure design and testing updates and configuration changes in a staging setup, what is pretty awesome. The scripting framework they created for the migration will be released on Github. But this was not all they coded to customize their environment, they added some very helpful extensions for the operations team to Icinga Web 2, which will be available on Github somewhere in the future after separating company specific and upstream ready parts.
For the third session I had chosen Matthias Gallinger with „Netzwerkmonitoring mit Prometheus“ (Network monitoring with Prometheus). In his case study he showed the migration from Cacti to Prometheus and Grafana done at a international company based in Switzerland. The most important part is here the SNMP Exporter for Prometheus including a generator for its configuration. All required is part of their labs edition of Open Monitoring Distribution (OMD).
After the lunch Serhat Can started with „Building a healthy on-call culture„. He provided and explained his list of rules which should create such a culture: Be transparent – Share responsibilities – Be prepared – Build resilient and sustainable systems – Create actionable alerts – Learn from your experiences. To sum up he tells everyone to care about the on-call people resulting in a good on-call service and user experience which will prevent a loss of users and money.
The Director of UX at Grafana Labs David Kaltschmidt gave an update on whats new and upcoming in Grafana focusing on the logging feature in „Logging is coming to Grafana„. The new menu entry Explore allows to easily querying Prometheus metrics including functions – just one click away – for rate calculation or average and it works the same for logging entries as a new type of datasource. This feature should be very useful in a Kubernetes environment to do some distributed tracing. If you are interested in this feature it should be available as beta in December.
Distributed Tracing FAQ“ was also the title of Gianluca Arbezzano’s talk. I can really recommend his talk for the good explanation on why and how to trace requests through more and more complex, distributed services of nowadays. If you are more interested in tool links, he recommends Opentracing as library, Zipkin as frontend and of course InfluxDB as backend.
This year Bernd’s talk about the „Current State of Icinga“ was crowded and interesting as always. I skip the organizational things like interest in the project is growing according to website views, customers talking about their usage, partners, camps and meetups all over the world. From the technical aspects Icinga 2 had a release bringing more stabilization, improved Syntax Highlighting and as new feature Namespacing. The coming Director release brings support for multiple instances helping with staging, health checks and a configuration basket allowing to easily export and import configuration. A new Icinga Web 2 module X509 helps managing your certificate infrastructure, available next week on github. The one for VMware vSphere (sponsored by dmTECH) is already released and was shown in a demo by Tom who developed it. Icinga DB will replace IDO as a backend moving volatile data to Redis and data to be keeped will be stored to MySQL or PostgreSQL and there will also be a new Monitoring Module for Icinga Web 2 to make use of it, all available hopefully in two weeks.
This year’s OSMC provided something special as the last talk of the first day with an authors‘ panel including Marianne Spiller (Smart Home mit openHAB 2), Jan Piet Mens (Alternative DNS Servers – Choice and deployment, and optional SQL/LDAP back-ends), Thomas Widhalm and Lennart Betz (Icinga 2 – Ein praktischer Einstieg ins Monitoring) moderated by Bernd and answering questions from the audience.
If you want to get more details or pictures have a look at Twitter. There will also be a post by Julia giving a more personal view on the conference from interviewing some attendees and one of me covering the talks of the second day, but now I am heading for the evening event.

Dirk Götz
Dirk Götz
Principal Consultant

Dirk ist Red Hat Spezialist und arbeitet bei NETWAYS im Bereich Consulting für Icinga, Puppet, Ansible, Foreman und andere Systems-Management-Lösungen. Früher war er bei einem Träger der gesetzlichen Rentenversicherung als Senior Administrator beschäftigt und auch für die Ausbildung der Azubis verantwortlich wie nun bei NETWAYS.

OSMC: Extend your stay / knowledge!

 
OSMC is coming! Once again the Open Source Monitoring Conference assembles some of the most important representatives of the international Open Source scene. Get in touch and inspired by their talks:
 

>> CHECK OUT THE PROGRAM

 
Besides the lecture program OSMC offers plenty of opportunities to learn even more: Round off your participation with…

  • A pre-conference Workshop | Nov 05. FYI: Prometheus and Icinga 2 / Puppet are sold out. Get your Graylog or Ansible workshop ticket quickly!
  • What the… Hackathon! Team up, define the challenge, collaborate, succeed | Nov 08.
  • OSCAMP on Puppet! Same venue, NEW EVENT with a special focus: Be part of the Puppet Masters League | Nov 08. For more info and your OSCAMP ticket visit: opensourcecamp.de

Don’t miss the chance to extend your stay / knowledge and get your OSMC conference ticket plus add-on!
 

>> REGISTER NOW!

 
We would be happy to see you soon at…

#OSMC | November 5 – 8, 2018 | Nuremberg

OSMC 2018: Choose what suits you!


OSMC | Open Source Monitoring Conference | November 5 – 8, 2018 | Nuremberg
Hello Monitoring Lovers,
Great events cast their shadows ahead: From November 5 – 8, 2018, Open Source Monitoring Conference will take place in Nuremberg – with two days of enlightening presentations on November 6 & 7, one day of technical workshops on November 5, and the fun community hackathon on November 8. Call for papers is still open until July, 31 – and for all monitoring enthusiasts considering to register: We have good news for you!
You can choose the presentation format that suits you!
Decide between three options:

  1. Ignite talk – 5 minutes: As a presenter, you must make tough decisions. How long should you present? How many slides should you create? How should you organize the speech? – You prefer a clear structure? Submit an Ignite talk: Five minutes to talk accompanied by 20 slides, 15 seconds each.
  2. 20 – 25 minutes: An Ignite talk is not exactly the right thing for you, but nevertheless you like to put things in a nutshell and keep it short and simple? For you we have created the short lecture format limited to 20-25 minutes.
  3. 50 – 55 minutes: Your findings require more time? You are used to presenting in around an hour? Or you want to integrate a live demonstration of a feature into your talk? Submit a talk for the longer lecture format of 50 – 55 minutes.

A Q&A session is scheduled after each presentation. The conference will be held in English and German. Presentations in English are particularly welcome!
My colleague Keya has already given you a bundle of reasons why you should get on stage. Check out her list! In short – being a speaker at OSMC you can:

  1. Add new research to your list
  2. Increase your productivity
  3. Be the Open Source monitoring agent of change
  4. Monitor your social life

For guidelines for speeches and to submit a talk visit: osmc.de

OSMC 2018 – NOW is the time to register


OSMC 2018 | The Leading Event on Open Source Monitoring | Nov 05 – 08 Nuremberg
You are working on a new feature for Open Source Monitoring?
You found a genius way to solve a problem?
Best practice is your daily practice?
Share your knowledge and experiences with the community! DO IT NOW: Register as a speaker for OSMC!
The Open Source Monitoring Conference – short OSMC – is THE annual meeting of international open source enthusiasts in Nuremberg. The conference will be held in English and German. Presentations in English are particularly welcome. Speakers can choose between two possible formats: The long lecture that takes around 50-55 minutes and the short one, limited to 20 minutes. Talks can be submitted until June 30, 2018.
Besides the Presentations on Nov 06 & 07, the event comprises a day of technical Workshops on “Prometheus”, “Ansible”, “Icinga 2 / Puppet” and “Graylog” on Nov 05 and the Hackathon directly following the lecture program, on Nov 08.
OSMC takes place in Nuremberg, Nov 05 – Nov 08. Until June 30, 2018  you also have the chance to grab one of our Early Bird Tickets to be one of the more than 250 Open Source Lovers that attend the event. For further informations visit osmc.de.