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OSMC 2023 | Behind the Scenes Part 2/2

As a trainee in marketing, I had the opportunity to attend OSMC 2023 on 8th of November. Today, I will tell you about my first-hand experience at the event and give you a few insights into what happened behind the scenes.

Insights on the Eventee App

To enhance the OSMC experience, we provided our attendees the Eventee App. It was used to create a personal agenda, get updates, connect with other attendees, and stay informed. After scanning the QR code at the back of the participants’ conference badge’s they signed up easily, and then networked like on Tinder. Swiped through profiles, chatted, and stayed in the loop with the feed’s updates. Planning their individual schedule was also an easy task with the app!

So many Chances to win a Price!

We have also used the app to send out some tips regarding our OSMC raffle. In the giveaway, there was a glass safe with a Lego set inside. Participants had to crack a four-digit code to access the prize. Hints for the number combinations were sent through the app. I have to say, you all impressed me with your quick and skillful solving of challenges, earning some fantastic Lego set rewards. Impressive!

NETWAYS WEB SERVICES, our Silver Sponsor, brought in a fun guessing game. People tried to guess how many M&M’s were in a bottle. The prize was a cool Baby Yoda Lego set. It was tricky and engaging to guess the sweets.

Our Silver Sponsor, Elastic, also had a thrilling price competition. By scanning the QR code on the front of the attendee’s conference badges, they’ve got a chance to win a Lego set as well. Cheers to the winner whose luck was on their side!

Food, Catering, and more Food

Now let’s talk about the food. Brace yourselves because the buffet at the conference hall was a nice feast. From breakfast menus with pretzels to sandwiches, delectable desserts, and vegan options, the choices were endless. And just when you thought you couldn’t possibly eat more, the catering team swooped in with their never-ending supply of delicious treats.

Our Camera Team

A big thanks to our camera team – Cecilia, Tatevik, Björn, and Saeid. They recorded all the presentations, enabling you to revisit them at your convenience on YouTube and in the conference archives. In case you missed this year’s OSMC, it’s a great way to level up your skills.

The Evening Event at Korn´s

And let’s not forget the Dinner & Drinks event at KORN´S. It was the perfect place for deep conversations, establishing valuable networks, and, of course, having a great time together. Grabbing a drink of choice, diving into discussions with the amazing community, and following up with live music – the evening could not have gone better. Even as a non-technical person, I soaked up so much knowledge on monitoring. Thank you all for sharing your expertise with me!

Our Thanks to You

We couldn’t let you leave without showing our appreciation. So, as you headed home, we handed out lunch boxes and a personal OSMC cup, your souvenir to cherish this memory with us.

We hope to see you again at OSMC 2024, where we can continue this journey together. I had absolute fun attending OSMC 2023, and I hope I was able to give you a glimpse into my view of this event. Thank you for joining us, stay tuned!

Irene Hahn
Irene Hahn
Junior Account Manager

Irene startete ihre Ausbildung bei NETWAYS im September 2023. Sie ist gespannt, wie abwechslungsreich und außergewöhnlich ihre kommenden Aufgaben werden. In ihrer Freizeit malt sie entweder an Bilder rum oder zockt an ihrer Switch.

OSMC 2023 | Day 3 Recap

Day two of the OSMC 2023 started rather quiet, but with a interesting set of talks. The following is a summary and review of some talks I watched and was interested in. Therefore not all of the talks are mentionend here and this should not be interpreted as a judgement of their quality or significance.

 

Automated update management with Renovate

Sebastian Gumprich describes his journey of introducing Renovate at scale at his work place. Renovate is a software for updating dependencies in software projects, which can be self-hosted and is therefore applicable in practically every environment.

Renovate analyses the software project which is called upon, detects the dependencies, fetches data about the available versions of those and applies then updates, if any are available, and it is configured to do so.

To integrate it better into the existing development process and to not apply more load on the developers, an application as a GitLab pipeline was chosen and realized. This approach was also scalable over a huge number of different projects and repositories then.

To work correctly (and do anything) Renovate needs some configuration, which is presented as JSON and, in most cases, rather small and easy to do

The presentation was partly about the technical ideas and problem, but also, arguably more importantly, about the human part, which I found most interesting. Part of this was, unsurprisingly, structured and extensive documentation of the relevant steps and procedures and common problems. But also some programmatic features were introduced, for example, automatically opening Issues in GitLab for faulty Renovate configuration.

To further reduce the hurdles to apply Renove to a specific project, the “Onboarding” Merge Request applying the relevant changes were quite verbose in what it should do, what the consequences would be and where and whom to ask in case of open questions.

These point may seem obvious or even trivial, but, and this is the opinion of the author, organizing different people and groups of people and communicate in a constructive and efficient way is one of the biggest hurdles in the business and approaches to this set of problems are often quite interesting and helpful.

 

Replacing NSClient++ for Windows Monitoring

The second talk I want to advertise here is Sven Nierlein’s presentation of a replacement for the NSClient++.

The start of talk was the expectable review of the NSClient++, a monitoring agent which was quite common in different availability and status monitoring setups in the past, especially on windows operating systems. Sadly the developement is progressing slower nowadays than in the past and some problems, which were not fixed, are increasingly a dealbreaker. Especially, some problems with the lack of current TLS protocols are problematic.

Writing a new agent was not really the first choice, but a comparison of current alternatives did not present a good solution since the introduction of completely new configuration, new protocols and different workflows was not a feasible way to go. The resolution was therefore to write a completely new, but compatible monitoring agent.

This offered some freedoms regarding the choice of tools. The choicethen went in the direction of the Golang language and the related toolchain. The new agent was called SNClient+ (where SN stands forSecure Naemon) and supports multiple protocols from the side of themonitoring system.

One of the is the NRPE protocol for compatibility reasons and, the prefered method, an HTTP-based method, which can be used with chec_nsc_web.

Additionally, to add more features, a general Prometheus exporter wasintegrated, which exposes the general operating system exporters of thePrometheus ecosystem. Therefore, the SNClient+ can also be used as the default node exporter.

To stay compatible and enhance the functionality further, there are not only built in plugins to test different properties on the host machine, but a generic functionality to execute third-party plugins is included.

A self-updating functionality is also built-in to make updates as easy as possible.

In summary, this is a promising new solution for an old problem and is likely worth a try.

 

Running the Infra at FOSDEM

Rather spontaneously, Sebastian Schubert made a presentation about the infrastructure at FOSDEM, one of the largest Free and Open Source Software events in the world. The event occurs yearly at the beginning of February in Brussels, and they expect around 10.000 visitors/day with around 20.000 devices which need to be connected to the internet. This would be, by itself, a challenging task, but it is a totally different scenario to deploy that kind of infrastructure for just a few days and there are no paid professionals, just volunteers which might turn up with no idea what, where and how.

The astonishing fact, that this kind of organization actually works (and that repeatedly and successfully) can probably not be admired enough.

Additional to providing network access (and some services there), there is also the video and streaming setup for the hundreds of different talks, which must not only be recorded, but also, ideally, be live-streamed to the internet (currently over third parties).

For this purpose, self-designed hardware boxes were used in the past to re-encode the video and audio in first step on site, which are increasingly replaced by more common laptops. These serves as a kind of “render farm” to prepare the material for the viewer.

Following that was a short introduction to the tools used in the network setup and especially some problems regarding using IPv6-only network in the 2020s where some parts of the internet are still only reachable via IPv4. One example here was the usage coreDNS as a replacement for bind9 (for resource usage reasons).

A generally good idea mentioned then was the introduction of monitoring on- and off-site where data was replicated and still available when there was an incident which took the equipment of the FOSDEM crew at the university offline.

Another interesting point added was the general availability of practically all relevant material to the, public which allows interested parties to get some ideas how everything works there and maybe allows the adaption to other purposes.

 

openITCOCKPIT Community Edition – Einfache Konfiguration, Module, API und mehr

In this talk, Jens Michelsons presented openITCOCKPIT monitoring system, which is one of the “Nagios-similar” monitoring systems they created at the it-novum company.

The focus lies there on creating an easily usable web-based system, where everything is integrated. A powerful HTTP API serves as the main interface for all the different components and is well documented. This allows small scale configurations via the web interface or more automated setups with other tools.

A speciality of openITCockpit is problably their own monitoring agent for remote hosts and the strong integration of other tools, including the CheckMK agent, into their systems. A migration of an existing setup in openITCockpit or extending one with other tools is therefore less painful than it could be.

Remarkable was also the extended live demo (always a risk in a presentation) which presented a typical but not simple workflow for adding some systems to the monitoring, including a combining logic of different tests.

 

Zabbix – Powerful enterprise grade monitoring driven by Open Source

Appropriately, the following talk was about Zabbix, a system quite similar in many regards to openITCockpit. Wolfgang Alper described the working principles of Zabbix and what the main concepts and functionalities are.

The direct comparison was quite interesting, as one can recognize common ideas and components, but also where philosophies and ideas differ and how different problems were addressed.

One of the most important ideas in Zabbix is the separation of concerns, where gathering of data, storage, problem detection, alarming and escalation are split up programmatically and can be treated individually. The definition of these steps and their interfaces allows developers to focus on a specific part without having to worry about the whole.

Another part of the talk was dedicated to how Zabbix handles large scale and distributed setups. At this point, a part of the Zabbix software components which is called “Proxy” comes into play, and relays directions from the central system to outliers and data the other way round.

All in all Zabbix is probably a capable tool to do the classic network monitoring task, but of course not limited to that.

 

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 2023 | Recap Day 2

SNMP Monitoring at scale

After a warm welcome by Bernd and the sponsor Eliatra the talks started. The first talk I was interested in was “SNMP Monitoring at scale” by Rocco Pezzani from Würth Phoenix and Thomas Gelf from NETWAYS Professional Services. They teamed up to modernize SNMP monitoring and I was curious if the managed to do so. The talk started with anice summary of the problems you face in realtiy when using SNMP, and I think everyone using it practically known how complicated MIBs can be and how many of them are faulty. Their entry into the topic was to develop a MIB browser to be integrated into NetEye. One thing shown by this was the need of a new MIB parser, they plan for the future to relaxe parsing and compensate for errors as the number of faulty MIBs was too high. But they postponed this for the “funny” part, a module to collect and inventarise SNMP data of an environment. They directly solved challenges other modules still have to solve like decentraled collection of data or other SNMP monitoring solutions face based on performance. In addition to active polling, they already created a first prototype for a trap reciever. Believing their explanations and shown error, I think they could really have managed the targeted modernisation, but decide by yourself as the first release will come soon.

 

Will ChatGPT take over my job?

The second talk I visited was the buzzword filled “Will ChatGPT take over my job?” by Philipp Krenn. Of course, this was only his way to get people introduced to the topic. His main goal was to show the AI assitance integrated in the Elastic stack. While his demo was very nicely done and showed some great ideas, my personal feeling is that we are only at an early start, and it needs still needs improvement. This could be because it is a tech preview, or because of the exploratory mode of the AI used here. On the other hand, Philipp preferred this mode in contrast to the conservative mode which is used for the integration when it comes to security. But very important is still his warning that AI is just a tool you should learn to use, but not to trust at the current state. Based on the question of the audience, there was a big interest in the topic.

 

Icinga for Windows

Before the lunch break, Christian Stein gave his update on Icinga for Windows. He started with the things fixed and improved with the latest release and by giving a quick overview of Icinga for Windows. One big improvement was the introduction of the REST API, which limits concurrent checks and increases the execution performance while consume less resources. This requires the latest Icinga 2 version, as the required check command is integrated there for an easy integration for a good user experience. As a person interested in Security, I am also quite happy about his work on the JEA profiles. JEA stands for Just Enough Administration and is the Windows way of improving security. But this was only the current state, he also showed his visions for the future. The demo was about the improved management capabilities integrated in the console, allowing to remotely install on other servers. Other plans are a rewrite of some core features and to improve cluster monitoring, which will result in the next version being 2.0 next year. But there will be a 1.12 in between as preparation and for bug fixing.

 

The Ignite Talks

After everyone had his portion of the great lunch as desert, there were the Ignite talks. This format is perhaps well-known nowadays, but I always look up to those brave people who can do 20 slides with a fixed number of seconds each on automatic mode. In the first one “Honeypot Flavors: Open-Source Honeypots and their Use in the Automotive Industry” Niclas Ilg gave a quick look inside Bosch, how they use Honeypots and how they participate in development. The second one was our Daniel Bodky with “Metrics, Margins, Mutiny – How to make your SREs (not) run away” introducing the concept of Site Reliability Engineer to the audience. And last but not to least Felix Frank who always has the courage to tackle important but unpopular topics talked about “Your business isn’t Green enough“.

 

Impact assessment with Netbox Path

After those, I visited “Impact assessment with Netbox Path” by Dave Kempe from the Australian Icinga partner Sol1. He shortly introduced NetBox, an Open Source CMDB, and the Icinga Business Process Module and what challenge they solve with it in a monitoring environment. NetBox Path is a plugin to manage dependencies between objects in the CMDB in a graphical way, but also via API. This plugin they utilized to close the gap by adding a notification plugin which shows the path to users to provide them context.

 

What’s new with Grafana Labs’s Open Source Observability stack

Really interested I was in “What’s new with Grafana Labs’s Open Source Observability stack” by Sebastian Schubert from Grafana Labs. And it seemed that I am not the only one as the room was full and when asked if someone does not know Grafana anyone spoke up. He started with the improvements to Grafana which did not need any introduction. The second tool covered was Mimir, the metrics solution from Grafana Labs. After a short introduction, he showed the performance improvements and new features coming to in the last year. Next was the Log management solution Loki which works similar to Prometheus but for logs instead of metrics, again he introduced it shortly and show the improvements. He did the same for Tempo – the tracing solution, Beyla – another tracing solution which will be released in the near future, Faro – Browser or End User monitoring, and Pyroscope – the solution for profiling. I kept this summary quite short, as I plan to do another blogpost going into detail when the conference archive is online, so stay tuned.

 

Newest developments in Checkmk Raw – the open-source monitoring solution

It is always a good sign if you can not decide between talks as you want to be in both rooms, but as I had to decide I joined Lars Michelsen from Checkmk with “Newest developments in Checkmk Raw – the open-source monitoring solution” because I have not had a look on it for a while. The focus of the talk was on the raw edition, which is the community edition. There is also a enterprise edition with performance improvements and convenience features, and a cloud edition for those who want the enterprise solution in a hosted version. The web interface was improved to be a more modernized version of the same design goal and looks quite nice, especially with the graphing solution switched to the one from the enterprise edition. Also, communication with the agent is now more secure and also security is active by default. API for the web and plugins were improved, too. And these were only the changes before the last version, in this release more UI improvements and improvements on graphing integration of Grafana are included with many more small things. Numbers and Tools developed by the community shown by Lars show the Checkmk ecosystem being wealthy and growing. The same goes for the numbers from behind the scene like growth of the company. A nice tool he showed was Robotmk which integrates the Robot Framework into Checkmk for End-to-End-monitoring.

 

Current state of Icinga

And as always Bernd finished with “Current state of Icinga” the day. He started with a very short introduction, including some new and interesting success stories. Afterwards, he walked the audience through all the new module releases and the improvements which came with it. As this would be quite much, I will focus on the two new things.
Icinga Notifications will move the notification from the core to a new module, which will give you a much more granular control over notifications and escalations by incorporating schedules and giving all modules and in the future external solutions an endpoint to send notifications to. A usability test for it is going on during OSMC, a prerelease should happen later this year with the first release being planned for next year.
Icinga K8s Monitoring will replace all the current approaches to get Kubernetes to fit in Icinga’s data model with a much more fitting solution. This should be really helpful for users to get a much better look inside their environment. And it should be also available as a prerelease later in the year, with a final release next year.
He ended his talk with an outlook at upcoming events, just 15 minutes late, but right in the time 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 2023 | Highlights of Day 1

We’re looking forward to giving you some insights of our first OSMC day, which has been a full success. The first day is also known as the workshop day. But, besides these learning sessions, many other cool things have happened behind the scenes. So, let’s check out our highlights of today:

 

Setting up OSMC 2023

Of course, our day started by transforming the venue into a unique OSMC universe. Big thanks to Lukas and Markus, who made the location once again a very special one! We hope, you like it as much as we do!

 

The Workshops

At 10 AM, the excitement was high as our workshops finally began. Our trainer started their training classes on the topics “Understanding Git & GitLab”, “Extending Icinga Web”, and “Monitoring with Telegraf and Influx”.

 

Waiting for our Guests…

At 3 PM, Lukas and I have opened the check-in counter. We have been waiting for 250 attendees to check in. It has been a pleasure to finally welcome our guests here in Nuremberg!

 

The Welcome Dinner

After many people have already checked-in, the first ones gathered at the Welcome Dinner. A fantastic opportunity to have initial conversations with the community and to reconnect.

 

We’re now wishing our guests a wonderful rest of the first OSMC evening. Enjoy the dinner to the fullest and see us tomorrow at 9:15 AM at the Welcome Session in room Jacobi!

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 2023 | Thanks to our Sponsors & Partners

The Open Source Monitoring Conference (OSMC) is just around the corner and takes place from November 7th to 9th in Nuremberg. Look forward to an extraordinary community event where international experts shape the future of IT monitoring.

 

This year’s phenomenal OSMC Sponsors! 

We now take the chance to express our sincere appreciation for your valuable support. Your partnership is a vital aspect of our event’s success, and we’re genuinely thankful for your contribution. It significantly enhances the event experience for all involved. Thank you for being an essential part of our journey and shaping our event!

We’re excitedly looking forward to finally welcoming our sponsors and media partners to this year’s OSMC!

 

Tickets still Available!

Hey, just a quick heads up – there are still some tickets left, and yes, we’ve got spots for our awesome workshops too! We’re not sold out yet, so there’s still time to jump in and be part of OSMC 2023! Get ready for a conference that will redefine your approach to monitoring and observability in open-source!

See you soon there!

Irene Hahn
Irene Hahn
Junior Account Manager

Irene startete ihre Ausbildung bei NETWAYS im September 2023. Sie ist gespannt, wie abwechslungsreich und außergewöhnlich ihre kommenden Aufgaben werden. In ihrer Freizeit malt sie entweder an Bilder rum oder zockt an ihrer Switch.