Archived Registration Tiers
| Silver |
| $1,195 USD |
| Gold |
| $1,595 USD |
About the Conference
Welcome to the official site of the second Nagios World Conference in North America, held in Saint Paul, MN (USA), on September 25th–28th, 2012.
The Nagios World Conference offered attendees a unique venue to collaborate and enhance their knowledge on everything Nagios—the industry standard in IT infrastructure monitoring. The conference featured knowledgeable speakers and covered a variety of subject matters, including:
- New product announcements
- Best practices
- Case studies and success stories
- Scalability, distributed monitoring, and performance tuning
- Cloud computing and automation
- Mapping and visualization tools
- Training courses and workshops
- Development tutorials
- New developments and features
Who Should Attend?
The Nagios World Conference is ideal for individuals and organizations that are looking to deploy or enhance a Nagios monitoring solution in their environment or increase their knowledge of Nagios and its extensive suite of addons. The conference is targeted at systems and network administrators, developers, IT managers, and other IT professionals.
Conference Location and Hotel
The Nagios World Conference North America took place at the Embassy Suites Hotel in downtown Saint Paul, MN. All Gold attendees were provided a room at the Embassy Suites Hotel.
Hotel Address:
Embassy Suites St. Paul Downtown
175 East 10th Street
Saint Paul, Minnesota, USA 55101
Tel: 1-651-224-5400
Fax: 1-651-224-0957
Conference Photos
Thanks to Jamie Piekkola of Jamie Piekkola Photography for being the official photographer at the conference and to attendees who shared some of their own photos for inclusion in our Flickr stream.
Conference Presentations
Videos
All presentations at the conference were videotaped and are available online. Full-length presentation videos are located in the Nagios Library.
Conference attendees receive free access to the full-length presentation videos. If you attended the conference but have not received credentials to access the videos, please contact us.
Free access to conference videos is also available to customers who have purchased:
If you did not attend the conference but would like to watch the full-length presentations, you may purchase a subscription to the videos for $99 USD.
Slide Downloads
You can download the slides for the 2012 conference presentations and workshops below.
Day 2: September 26th
| Speaker | Presentation Title | Slides and Files |
|---|---|---|
| Ethan Galstad | Keynote | PPTX Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Andrew Widdersheim | Nagios Is Down And Your Boss Wants To See You | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Sheeri Cabral | Alerting on MySQL with Nagios | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Mike Weber | High Availability for Nagios XI | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Todd Groten | Case Study: Monitoring Call of Duty: Elite… or How To Dynamically Scale Monitoring in the Cloud | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Alex Solomon | Managing Your Heroes: The People Aspect of Monitoring | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Mike Weber | Monitoring Linux With NRPE | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Andreas Ericsson | Nagios Core Worker Processes | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Robert Bolton | Custom SNMP OID Creation for System Monitoring | PPT Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| John Sellens | Workshop: “Non-Obvious” Nagios (2 Hours) | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Mike Guthrie | Nagios XI 2012 | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Sam Lansing | Automating Windows Application Testing and Problem Resolution With Nagios | ODP Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Eric Loyd | Nagios Implementation Case: Eastman Kodak | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Nathan Vonnahme | Monitoring The User Experience For Availability and Performance | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Dave Williams | Experiences with Embedding Nagios on the Raspberry Pi | PPT (Slideshare) |
Day 3: September 27th
| Speaker | Presentation Title | Slides and Files |
|---|---|---|
| Nathan Broderick | Bringing Nagios XI Into Your Business | PPT (Slideshare) |
| John Sellens | Nagios and Another Layer of Indirection | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Dave Josephsen | Stop Being Lazy And Write An Event Broker Module Already | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Bryan McLellan | Configuring Nagios With Chef | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Troy Lea | Custom Wizards, Components and Dashlets in Nagios XI | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Yancy Ribbens | Advanced Windows Monitoring With WMI, Powershell and VBScript | ODP Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Scott Wilkerson | Monitoring Solutions For Remote Networks And Mobile Devices | PDF Video (Slideshare) |
| Anders Haal | Why Dynamic and Adaptive Thresholds Matter | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Alexis Le-Quoc | A Deep Dive into Nagios Analytics | PPT Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Nick Scott | Netflow Monitoring and SNMP Trap Management With Nagios | ODP Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Mike Guthrie | Nagios Fusion 2012 | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Mike Weber | 10 Quick Steps to Disaster With Nagios | (Slideshare) |
| John Murphy | Rational Configuration Design To Prevent Irrational Problem Solving | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Paloma Galan | Case Study: Nagios Deployment In Spain | DOP (Slideshare) |
| Mike Weber | Object Inheritance: The Foundation of Nagios Management | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Daniel Wittenberg | Scaling Nagios Core at Fortune 50 Company | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Nick Scott | Advanced Data Analytics For Nagios | ODP Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Dave Josephsen | 2002 Called: They Want Their RRDTool Shell Scripts Back | ODP (Slideshare) |
Day 4: September 28th
| Speaker | Presentation Title | Slides and Files |
|---|---|---|
| Fernando Honig | Nagios Distributed Monitoring for Web Applications using WebInject | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Jason Cook | Nagios and Mod Gearman In A Large-Scale Environment | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Nathan Vonnahme | Writing Custom Nagios Plugins | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Nicolas Brousse | Optimizing your Monitoring and Trending tools for the Cloud | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Yancy Ribbens | Automatic Deployment And Management Of Windows Agents | ODP Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
| Marcel Hecko | The Importance of Visual Representation of Monitoring Data | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Kishore Jalleda | Nagios in the Agile/Devops/Continuous Deployment World | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Andreas Ericsson | Redundant and Load-Balanced Monitoring With Merlin | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Ludmil Miltchev | Bulk Management Of Hosts And Services In Nagios XI | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Jared Bird | Nagios: Providing Value Throughout The Organization | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Alexis Le-Quoc | Javascript Meets Nagios: Interactive Data Exploration for Post-Mortems | PPT Addt’l Files (Slideshare) |
Schedule
| Day 1: Sept 25th | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Event | ||
| 6:00 p.m.–10:30 a.m. | Registration and Welcome Event | ||
| Day 2: Sept 26th | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Track 1 | Track 2 | Track 3 |
| 8:00 a.m.–9:00 a.m. | Registration | ||
| 9:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. | Keynote and Welcome by Ethan Galstad (Track 1) | ||
| 10:00 a.m.– 10:30 a.m. | Break | ||
| 10:30 a.m.–11:20 a.m. | Nagios is Down and Your Boss Wants To See You by Andrew Widdersheim | Alerting on MySQL with Nagios by Sheeri Cabral | High Availability for Nagios XI by Mike Weber |
| 11:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | Case Study: Monitoring Call of Duty: Elite… or How To Dynamically Scale Monitoring in the Cloud by Todd Groten | Managing Your Heroes: The People Aspect of Monitoring, by Alex Solomon | Monitoring Linux with NRPE by Mike Weber |
| 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. | Lunch + BoF Sessions | ||
| 2:00 p.m.–2:50 p.m. | Nagios Core Worker Processes by Andreas Ericsson | Custom SNMP OID Creation for System Monitoring by Robert Bolton | Workshop: “Non-Obvious” Nagios (2 Hours) by John Sellens |
| 3:00 p.m.–3:50 p.m. | Nagios XI 2012 by Mike Guthrie | Automating Windows Application Testing and Problem Resolution with Nagios by Sam Lansing | |
| 4:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m. | Break | ||
| 4:30 p.m.–5:20 p.m. | Nagios Implementation Case by Eastman Kodak and Eric Loyd | Monitoring the User Experience for Availability and Performance by Nathan Vonnahme | Experiences with Embedding Nagios on Raspberry Pi by Dave Williams |
| 7:00 p.m.– 12:00 p.m. | Evening Event | ||
| Day 3: Sept 27th | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Track 1 | Track 2 | Track 3 |
| 9:00 a.m.–9:50 a.m. | Bringing Nagios XI into Your Business by Nathan Broderick | Nagios and Another Layer of Indirection by John Sellens | Stop Being Lazy and Write an Event Broker Module Already by Dave Josephsen |
| 10:00 a.m.– 10:30 a.m. | Break | ||
| 10:30 a.m.–11:20 a.m. | Configuring Nagios with Chef by Bryan McLellan | Custom Wizards, Components and Dashlets in Nagios XI by Troy Lea | Advanced Windows Monitoring with WMI, Powershell and VBScript by Yancy Ribbens |
| 11:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | Monitoring Solutions for Remote Networks and Mobile Devices, by Scott Wilkerson | Why Dynamic and Adaptive Thresholds Matter, by Anders Haalt | A Deep Dive into Nagios Analytics by Alexis Le-Quoc |
| 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. | Lunch + BoF Sessions | ||
| 2:00 p.m.–2:50 p.m. | Netflow Monitoring and SNMP Trap Management With Nagios by Nick Scott | Nagios Fusion 2012 by Mike Guthrie | 10 Quick Steps to Disaster With Nagios by Mike Weber |
| 3:00 p.m.–3:50 p.m. | Rational Configuration Design To Prevent Irrational Problem Solving by John Murphy | Case Study: Nagios Deployment In Spain by Paloma Galan | Object Inheritance: The Foundation of Nagios Management by Mike Weber |
| 4:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m. | Break | ||
| 4:30 p.m.–5:20 p.m. | Scaling Nagios Core at Fortune 50 Company by Daniel Wittenberg | Advanced Data Analytics for Nagios by Nick Scott | 2002 Called: They Want Their RRDTool Shell Scripts Back by Dave Josephsen |
| 6:00 p.m.–10:30 p.m. | Room Closed | Room Closed | BoF Sessions (1 Hour Each) |
| Day 4: Sept 28th | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Track 1 | Track 2 | Track 3 |
| 9:00 a.m.–9:50 a.m. | Nagios Distributed Monitoring for Web Applications Using WebInject by Fernando Honig | Nagios and Mod Gearman In A Large-Scale Environment by Jason Cook | Writing Custom Nagios Plugins by Nathan Vonnahme |
| 10:00 a.m.– 10:30 a.m. | Break | ||
| 10:30 a.m.–11:20 a.m. | Optimizing your Monitoring and Trending Tools for the Cloud by Nicolas Brousse | Automatic Deployment and Management of Windows Agents by Yancy Ribbens | The Importance of Visual Representation of Monitoring Data by Marcel Hecko |
| 11:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | Nagios in the Agile/Devops/Continuous Deployment World by Kishore Jalleda | Redundant and Load-Balanced Monitoring, with Merlin and Andreas Ericsson | Bulk Management Of Hosts and Services in Nagios XI by Ludmil Miltchev |
| 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. | Lunch + BoF Sessions | ||
| 2:00 p.m.–2:50 p.m. | Nagios: Providing Value Throughout The Organization by Jared Bird | – | Javascript Meets Nagios: Interactive Data Exploration for Post-Mortems by Alexis Le-Quoc |
| 3:00 p.m.–3:50 p.m. | BoF Sessions | ||
| 4:00 p.m. | Conference Ends | ||
Speakers
Ethan Galstad: Founder @ Nagios
Ethan is the creator of Nagios from its earliest days in 1999 under the name “NetSaint.” He currently serves as the President of Nagios Enterprises and is involved in product development, architectural design, world dominance strategies, and various management duties that seem to take more time than they should. During his free time, he enjoys reading and working on his homestead getaway.
Keynote
The keynote will cover new developments in Nagios and where things are going in the future. Topics covered will include commercial products, open-source projects, and community initiatives.
New and Upcoming Nagios Solutions
Ethan will demonstrate new Nagios products and discuss their capabilities and benefits. Upcoming product roadmaps and release schedules will also be announced.
Andrew Widdersheim: Systems Administrator at INetU Managed Hosting
Andrew has been a systems administrator at INetU Managed Hosting for the last three years and has worked solely on the Nagios implementation and environment there. As part of his work, he created a one-step build process for a large-scale HA Nagios deployment.
Nagios Is Down, and Your Boss Wants To See You
Handling Nagios in a large-scale environment requires the ability to manage releases, scaling issues, and failures. The OS community provides many ways to solve these problems. This talk will cover how RPMs, SVN, Pacemaker, DRBD, MySQL, NDO, pnp4nagios, rrdcached, NagioSQL, and Nagios Core were used together to provide a system that:
- Can handle tens of thousands of active service checks
- Trend performance data
- Node failures and recovery in under five minutes
- Emergency fixes moved to production through release management in under two hours
During this session, we will cover overall design issues encountered during implementation and lessons learned in production.
Dave Josephsen: Systems Administrator and Author
2002 Called: They Want Their RRDTool Shell Scripts Back
This will be a short history of visualization options for Nagios, ending with an in-depth introduction to graphite and some real-world integration advice.
Stop Being Lazy And Write An Event Broker Module Already
This will be a class or instructional talk about writing NEB modules for novice C programmers or programmers with a passing familiarity with C.
Ludmil Miltchev: Tech @ Nagios
Ludmil is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He likes Linux and open-source and enjoys testing software and finding bugs.
Bulk Management of Hosts and Services in Nagios XI
The talk will cover bulk management tools in Nagios XI, including what tools are available and how they can be used. Bulk import and cloning of hosts and services will be covered, along with bulk user management tools.
Yancy Ribbens: Tech @ Nagios
Yancy is a member of the Technical Support Team at Nagios Enterprises. He holds a degree in computer networking, will be finishing his second degree this year in mathematics, and plans to pursue further education in the area of computer science. While working his way through school, Yancy has nearly five years of 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 with his favorite dog, Chinook.
Automatic Deployment and Management of Windows Agents
The presentation will demonstrate the use of a new Nagios utility that can automatically deploy monitoring agents to Windows boxes with minimal work on the part of the administrator. This tool can be used for deploying new agents or updating existing agents across multiple machines, in or outside of a domain.
Advanced Windows Monitoring with WMI, Powershell, and VBScript
The presentation will cover the basics of writing Nagios plugins in Powershell and VBscript in order to extend the Windows monitoring capabilities of Nagios. The presentation will cover agentless monitoring of Windows machines using WMI.
Scott Wilkerson: Developer @ Nagios
Scott is the technical support manager and developer at Nagios Enterprises. He has a degree in computer programming as well as almost 20 years of experience in the IT industry and 12 in senior management. Away from work, he enjoys vacationing with his family, hunting, and fishing.
Passive Monitoring Solutions for Remote Networks and Mobile Devices
The presentation will cover the installation, usage, and benefits of NRDS, a cross-platform (Windows, Linux, *NIX, OSX) passive agent for Nagios with automatic update support and support for remote configuration management.
Nicholas Scott: Developer @ Nagios
Nick Scott is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He attends the University of Minnesota, where he studies electrical and computer engineering. In his free time, he enjoys hacking in Python, taking things out of context, and analytical number theory.
Advanced Data Analytics for Nagios
The presentation will cover advanced data analytics, including capacity planning, trend prediction, and event correlation, and the tools that can be used for analysis.
Netflow Monitoring and SNMP Trap Management with Nagios
The presentation will cover monitoring Netflow data and SNMP traps using Nagios Network Analyzer and NSTI.
Sam Lansing: Tech @ Nagios
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 he 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 roommates and family.
Automating Windows Application Testing and Problem Resolution with Nagios
The presentation will cover the method for automating application testing on Windows machines as well as proactive problem resolution for Windows services and applications using event handlers.
Mike Guthrie: Lead Developer @ Nagios
Mike Guthrie is the lead developer at Nagios Enterprises and has developed new features and addons for Nagios Core, Nagios XI, and Nagios Fusion. Mike does the bulk of his programming in PHP and particularly enjoys front-end web development and data visualizations. When he’s not at work, he enjoys spending time with his family, being outside, and working on his house.
Nagios XI 2012
This presentation will cover new features and capabilities in the new 2012 release of Nagios XI, including improved auto-discovery, scheduled reports, bulk management tools, new components, and wizards.
Nagios Fusion 2012
This presentation will cover new features and capabilities in the new 2012 release of Nagios Fusion, a product designed to allow for greater scalability of distributed setups than other methods. The presentation will also cover challenges with other distributed monitoring solutions (such as DNX and ModGearman) and how Fusion helps overcome these problems.
Nathan Broderick: CEO/Founder @ AI Vector
Nathan is the founder and CEO of AI Vector LLC, a company that specializes in system administration and monitoring for companies of all sizes. AI Vector has set up monitoring for several companies, including Nu Skin International, to monitor our systems locally and overseas.
Bringing Nagios XI Into Your Business
This presentation will cover the best way to migrate to Nagios XI as well as many of the benefits that XI brings you over Nagios Core.
Eric Loyd: CEO @ Bitnetix Incorporated
Eric Loyd is the founder and CEO of Bitnetix Incorporated, an IT consulting and systems integration company dedicated to providing highly customizable VOIP telephone systems and expert advice in all areas of technology, IT, and computers to not-for-profit organizations and small businesses. Mr. Loyd has 25 years of IT experience and 10 years in senior management, and the Nagios platform he designed for monitoring the Kodak.com server farm in 2004 is still in use today. He is also a musician, photographer, amateur astronomer, and aspiring serial entrepreneur.
Nagios Implementation Case: Eastman Kodak
This presentation will cover a Nagios implementation that was done at Eastman Kodak. It could alternatively be titled “How Predictive Failure Recovery Lets Our Support Staff Get a Full Night’s Sleep.” This talk will demonstrate how Kodak implemented predictive failure recovery to increase the quality of life of its overworked support staff by decreasing the number of on-call pages received in the middle of the night and day. Topics covered will include:
- A history of Eastman Kodak’s kodak.com web server infrastructure
- Why Kodak chose Nagios to monitor kodak.com
- What the initial hurdles were in this complex server environment
- How we leveraged SSH to solve remote server issues
- How we manage Nagios configuration files
- Using a common event handler
- Integrating Nagios into Operational Procedures
- Using SSH to execute checks on remote machines as active checks instead of passive checks
- Using cfengine, rsync, and makefiles to manage, distribute, and update configuration files
- How a naming scheme for machine names, service names, and parameters included in those names allows a single event handler to do ‘heavy lifting’ for complex tasks with a simple API
- Using custom scripts to directly manipulate the Nagios command file, thus implementing a basic Nagios API for other operational procedures to simplify overall system operations and application support
The talk will focus on techniques regarding notification, escalation, and automatic event handler processing that enabled Nagios to solve most of the routine problems that would occur prior to notifying operations staff. This allowed us to dramatically decrease pages at all hours (but especially in the middle of the night) and let our staff be more restful and productive as a result.
Andreas Ericsson: System Designer @ op5
Andreas is one of the Nagios Core developers. He started fiddling with Nagios back in 2003. In other words, “In 2009, I was granted the highest honor available in this community when I became one of the core developers. Sort of like being knighted in the days of yore 😉 In my spare time, I like to work out, play beach volleyball, kick back with some PlayStation gaming, or read fantasy books. All of it can, and often is, combined with hanging out with my friends or my girlfriend. I work as a system designer and programmer. If I could choose a profession, though, I’d be a gardener in the summertime, a stunt helicopter pilot when there’s a need for that, and a programmer during the long, cold Swedish winters.”
Nagios Core Worker Processes
This presentation will provide an in-depth look at how Nagios Core Worker processes work, the APIs that make them tick, and how additional addons can be quickly developed using those APIs.
Redundant and Load-Balanced Monitoring with Merlin
This presentation will provide a technical explanation of how Merlin works and why everyone should want to use it.
John Murphy: Server Engineer @ Kmart Australia
John has worked at Kmart Australia for the last three years as a server engineer and is responsible for the deployment and maintenance of the company’s Nagios installation. John is also a current Nagios community MVP and all-around IT enthusiast.
Rational Configuration Design To Prevent Irrational Problem Solving
This session will discuss configuration and automation design considerations for a manageable and scalable Nagios monitoring solution. The following topics will be included:
- Designing your config to reduce administrative overhead
- Accounting for change and new integration tasks
- When to acknowledge you’ve gone one band-aid fix too far
- Using your network infrastructure setup to take configuration automation shortcuts
Troy Lea: Senior VAULT Infrastructure Engineer @ Strategic Group
Troy Lea is a self-described jack of all trades. His background is in Microsoft products, starting in 1995 with DOS and Windows 3.11. From Troy: I have worked for various IT consulting companies supporting small businesses that needed IT support and have also spent some time working for a dedicated IT department in the engineering sector. In 2006, 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. This is the environment I continue to maintain and upgrade. In 2009, when looking at monitoring products for our hosted environment, we came across Nagios XI. This is where I saw how flexible the product was, and I started to create Wizards for Nagios XI. Since then, I have also created documentation, plugins, and components for Nagios XI. For an administrator who is new to Nagios XI, it can get a bit confusing trying to learn how to configure Nagios. You might download a plugin from the Nagios Exchange, but what is the next step? When I work out how to monitor a xyz device in my environment, I am then able to turn around and write a Nagios XI wizard for that xyz device. When someone downloads this wizard from the Nagios Exchange, all they need to do is step through the wizard, and after a few mouse clicks, they are monitoring the same xyz device in their environment. This is where my passion lies: in creating configuration wizards, making things easier for other administrators out there! I also enjoy a good game of darts, music festivals, and social dynamics.
Custom Wizards, Components and Dashlets in Nagios XI
This session will cover how to customize and write your own configuration wizards, components, and dashlets for Nagios XI. As part of the presentation, Troy will cover several of the XI projects he has created thus far.
Daniel Wittenberg: System Architect @ Insurance Giant
Dan has been a Unix/Linux admin for over 15 years and a NetSaint/Nagios user for almost 10 of those. Working 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 he has also contributed patches and updates to many others. He is also an avid open source promoter and uses it whenever possible.
Scaling Nagios Core at Fortune 50 Company
In this presentation, we will be covering all aspects of Nagios needed to scale to a large environment with over 35,000 devices and 1.4 million service checks. We will look at hardware, operating systems, Nagios Core, plugins, and configurations that you can use in a large-scale deployment. We’ll also cover some performance tuning guidelines that you can use to find some of your bottlenecks and where you can look to improve your configuration. Some plugins covered include PNP4Nagios, NSCA, NRPE, DNX, Livestatus/Multisite, Puppet, Splunk, and Cacti.
Nathan Vonnahme: Senior Software Engineer @ Banner Health
Nathan has been using Nagios since 2006 to monitor highly available IT systems at a hospital in Alaska. He likes hooking heterogeneous systems together to make them greater than the sum of their parts.
Monitoring The User Experience For Availability and Performance
Monitoring the actual user experience can be an important addition to your monitoring coverage. You can benchmark the effects of production changes and identify issues that lower-level monitoring might not be able to detect by measuring the availability and performance of your “finished product.” This talk will demonstrate front-end monitoring of legacy Windows apps delivered via Citrix as well as front-end web app monitoring.
Writing Custom Nagios Plugins
Custom Nagios plugins are easy to write, and they open up huge possibilities for Nagios. This demo/workshop will walk you through writing your first custom check script. We will start using Perl and the Nagios::Plugin toolkit, but move on to examples in other scripting environments, including AutoIt and Node.js. Bring your favorite language and editor!
Todd Groten: Senior Network Operations Engineer @ Activision Blizzard
Operations Engineer by day, gamer by night. Todd Groten has been active in the IT industry for over 28 years, with 15 of those in the specialty of system/application monitoring. He was a faithful NetSaint user for a period of time when he stepped away from the Linux world to become engrossed in the Windows Server monitoring universe, eventually specializing in Systems Center Operations Manager, from its humble NetIQ beginnings while working at Dell in Round Rock, TX, through all its various iterations to date, working for Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Todd was then asked to jump back into the Linux world and relocated from Redmond back to sunny Southern California to join Activision’s Call of Duty: Elite operations team as the lead Service Reliability Engineer, where he created the Elite Service monitoring infrastructure from the ground up using Nagios XI. When not writing plugins, administrating Nagios, leading the NOC team, or architecting the next piece of CoD: Elite infrastructure, Todd likes to play Modern Warfare 3, Geocache, practice studio photography, and sometimes even go gold prospecting.
Case Study: Monitoring Call of Duty: Elite… or How To Dynamically Scale Monitoring in the Cloud
Presenting a case study on monitoring Activision’s Call of Duty: Elite A high-traffic, highly scalable, deep-stats-tracking social network and web service for all Call of Duty gamers. Explaining how we monitor our dynamically scaled servers in the cloud and detailing the trials and tribulations of automating the adding and removing of servers in Nagios for that kind of highly fluid environment.
Robert Bolton: Systems Administrator @ University of Utah
For the past eight years, Robert V. Bolton has worked as a system administrator, focusing on IT infrastructure monitoring and automation. He specializes in the following open-source tools: Nagios, Cacti, and Cobbler. Currently, he works for the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah as a Linux and network administrator. Robert is also pursuing his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering from the University of Utah.
Custom SNMP OID Creation for System Monitoring
SNMP provides an excellent means of gathering system information. Tools such as Nagios and Cacti use this information for status monitoring and trending. However, some system information is not provided through SNMP. In these situations, both Nagios and Cacti have methods to obtain this data, but it is not easily shared between the two applications. This presentation introduces a technique for creating a unique branch in the OID tree structure that is simple for both Nagios and Cacti to access using Python and the snmp_passpersist module.
John Sellens: System Administrator @ SYONEX
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.
Nagios and Another Layer of Indirection
There’s an old saying that “you can solve any problem in computer science with another layer of indirection.” That goes double for Nagios. Because of the modular design of Nagios, it is easy to extend it in many ways using a number of mechanisms. Many of these mechanisms make use of commands external to the Nagios core (plugins, notifications, etc.) and provide ample opportunity for applying “another level of indirection” for increased functionality. In this talk, we will look at ways in which Nagios can be extended through indirection, with examples including tried-and-true techniques as well as new tools, including:
- the use of “negate,” “check_snmpexec,” “check_allstorage,” and other plugins
- “mb_divert” for diverting plugin execution to other servers or locations
- “tellito” for routing notifications over multiple mechanisms
- “genoa” for formatting and composing notifications depending on the content
Workshop: “Non-Obvious” Nagios (2 Hours)
The Nagios system and network monitoring engine are very well known and used in many networks, large and small. Basic installation and initial configuration of Nagios are usually fairly straightforward, but making use of some of the more advanced or obscure aspects of Nagios can make your monitoring much more effective. This class will cover some of the more advanced features and abilities of Nagios and its related tools, which are especially useful in larger or more complex environments or for higher degrees of automation or integration with other systems. The class will provide an introduction to installing and using Nagios, some of the most popular extensions available, and information on customizing Nagios in your own environment.
Marcel Hecko: Solutions Specialist @ blava.net
I finished my masters degree at Robert Gordon University in Scotland in industrial and product design. Has been an early adopter of Wi-Fi networks in Slovakia and a founding member of one of the first community-driven Wi-Fi networks in the world. Life hacker, visionary, and community-oriented person developing Wi-Fi networks for deprived areas in Scotland, the UK, and Bratislava, Slovakia. Has been given an open-source Excellence Award from the University of Edinburgh for the use of open source technologies in government environments and for being an active member of the open source community. Early member of Slovakia’s first hackerspace, Progressbar I am currently a freelance consultant for open source and especially open source monitoring solutions for the banking sector in central Europe, including Slovakia, Ukraine, and Poland. Developer of NagMap, a popular extension for Nagios for network visualization.
Importance of Visual Representation of Monitoring Data
NagMap has been a very popular visual extension to Nagios for the last several years. It visualizes data so it is easily readable, and users can make very quick decisions without doing any technical digging. Why do we forget about help desk people, and why are customers frustrated when they don’t see the actual status of the environment? Why has NagMap been more successful than other visualization tools, and what can be improved? Get users of Nagios more interested in extending their installations according to their visual needs. Being motivational in stressing the importance of visual perception in the operating environment. Seeing is believing.
Jason Cook: Systems Engineer @ Verisign
I have worked as a technologist and in various system administration-type roles for over 15 years, with a focus on web technologies, systems automation, and systems management. My history with Nagios goes back to NetSaint, and my current responsibilities include the design and support of Verisign’s Nagios infrastructure.
Nagios and Mod Gearman In A Large-Scale Environment
An examination of Nagios, Mod Gearman, and Merlin in a large-scale environment. Discussions include performance tuning, scaling considerations, performance on VMs, and challenges encountered along the way.
Nicolas Brousse: Lead Operations Engineer @ TubeMogul
Nicolas is a lead operations engineer at TubeMogul. He worked for the past 12 years at many industry-leading French start-ups, from web hosting to online video services like Multimania, Lycos, and Kewego. Nicolas gained experience working with heavy traffic and large user databases. By joining TubeMogul, a brand-focused video marketing company, he helped grow the infrastructure from 20 servers to over 700 servers and handle over 10 billion HTTP requests per day.
Optimizing your Monitoring and Trending Tools for the Cloud
Nowadays, most start-ups are using cloud solutions. While some will go from a public cloud to a hybrid solution, all have to deal with fast-growing infrastructure. In this presentation, I will go over a few solutions that we implemented at TubeMogul while growing from 20 servers to over 700 servers in 4 years and dealing with over 10 billion HTTP requests a day. With so much information and data every day, it’s hard to get a good read of what really matters and to alert the right person. You will learn how we integrated Nagios with Google Calendar for easy on-call rotation management, how we centralized our Nagios information from 5 different DCs to a common dashboard, and how we make daily maintenance reports for pro-active action.
Luis Contreras: Nagios Community Leader, Dominican Republic
Luis Contreras works as an SAP Basis Netweaver Administrator. He is involved in several open-source organizations, like Nagios Community Leader for the Dominican Republic, Latinux from Venezuela as the Linux Certification Coordinator, and CISL (Congreso Internacional de Software Libre) from Argentina as the Ambassador for the Dominican Republic for this congress. He has worked as a system administrator at IKEA in the Dominican Republic. Since 2005, he has given conferences about Linux, Nagios, and security over Linux at some universities in his country. He’s also working on founding his own company to offer Linux and Nagios support.
Success Cases: Nagios Implementations in the Dominican Republic
This presentation will cover three success cases of Nagios implementations and how each case helped the business save money and be more efficient in solving problems.
Dave Williams: Technical Architect @ Bull Information Systems Ltd
I have worked in the IT industry for over 35 years, mostly as a software engineer or sysadmin on systems from IBM Mainframes to Apple II. I am currently designing and implementing technology solutions involving networking, storage, and computing resources for numerous clients across Europe.
Experiences with Embedding Nagios on Raspberry Pi
Given the increase of interest in micro format systems, this presentation will describe an implementation of Nagios on the Raspberry Pi – a credit card-sized $25 computer. This will also demonstrate the ability to cluster these devices for horizontal scaling of capacity. At least one device will be on show for demonstrations.
Bryan McLellan: Technical Program Manager, Open-Source @ Opscode
As one of the original Chef developers, I now manage open source projects for Opscode. I have over a decade of experience in IT and web operations and have managed Nagios installations for many of those years.
Configuring Nagios with Chef
Don’t let your Nagios configurations get out of date while you’re busy building out more systems. I’ll show you how to use search-based infrastructure with Chef to automatically configure Nagios.
Sheeri Cabral: Database Administrator @ Mozilla
Sheeri K. Cabral has a master’s 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 organized the Boston, Massachusetts, USA, MySQL User Group and is the creator and co-host of OurSQLCast: 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 Administrator’s Bible and has been a technical editor for high-profile O’Reilly books such as High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition and CJ Date’s SQL and Relational Theory.
Alerting on MySQL with Nagios
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 how to use and extend this set of Nagios plugins to more effectively monitor your MySQL instance. There is a whitepaper at http://dev.palominodb.com/docs/nagios_plugins_2011_04.pdf.
Alex Solomon: Co-Founder and CEO @ PagerDuty
Alex Solomon is the co-founder and CEO of PagerDuty, the leading SaaS incident management solution that allows IT organizations to add on-call team scheduling and phone, SMS, and email alerts to most monitoring systems, including Nagios.
Managing Your Heroes: The People Aspect of Monitoring
While solutions like Nagios exist to give IT organizations amazing detail to help analyze everything from monitoring an entire IT infrastructure to immediate notification of when system failures occur, it is still up to the people within that organization to respond—your heroes.
In this session, Alex Solomon, co-founder and CEO of PagerDuty, will examine:
- The elements that are needed to create a great on-call team
- Best practices related to scheduling on-call teams to respond to outages
- The importance of escalated alerts through sms, email, and phone
- Scheduling of teams within different organizations, time-zones and internationally
- Integrating third-party applications into Nagios via an API to extend and tailor Nagios to fit your needs
Mike Weber: Lead Trainer @ SpiderTools.com
Mike is the lead trainer at CyberMontana Inc., the company behind SpiderTools.com. The company was established 13 years ago with the goal of providing Linux training at a reasonable cost. The company trains up to 200 people a week using virtual classrooms and live on-site training, including Nagios Basic and Advanced classes.
Object Inheritance: The Foundation of Nagios Management
This session will cover the basics of how objects are inherited in Nagios, including local vs. inherited variables, chaining, precedence in multiple sources, incomplete object definitions, custom variables, canceling inheritance, additive inheritance, and hostgroups as an illustration.
Monitoring Linux with NRPE
The standard for monitoring Linux is NRPE. We will show the basic use of NRPE and how to modify commands and use scripts that can be incorporated into the use of NRPE. We will also look at the various agents to help understand the differences and advantages of using them.
High Availability For Nagios XI
When bad stuff happens, it is always nice to have a failover option with Nagios. We will look at one option for how to create HA. Goals of this project:
- create master-slave relationship
- master is normally functioning XI, which sends history to the slave
- slave does not check services or hosts nor does it send notifications (when master is running)
- slave monitors master and when master fails, slave takes over with current history
- slave enables host and service checks when it becomes the master and enables notifications
- slave disables all checks and notifications when master comes online
- slave updates history of master when master comes online
10 Quick Steps to Disaster with Nagios
We will look at a few topics that can make your life miserable, make you look bad, and make you wish you were a Windows administrator. The goal will be not only to point out some of these but also to talk about how to fix or avoid these issues to improve Nagios performance and functionality.
- inheriting aberrations with objects
- hoping bad things won’t happen
- monitoring non-existent ports on switches
- ignoring or encouraging system warnings
- managing users and contacts
- encouraging non-accountability for changes
- abusing Nagios XI wizards
- disregarding network relationships
- importing infectious diseases
- overestimating human intelligence
Anders Haal: Founder and Senior Consultant @ Ingby
Anders Haal is an IT professional with a focus on project management and software development in the area of IT and business operations. He is one of the founders of the consulting company Ingeng^rsbyn AB, a company with a focus on business and software development. Anders is involved in two open source projects, Bischeck (www.bischeck.org) and SocBox, both projects related to surveillance and monitoring with Nagios. Anders holds a degree in MsEE from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden. In his spare time, he likes biking, snowboarding, telemark skiing, and golf together with family and friends.
Why Dynamic and Adaptive Thresholds Matter
The presentation will cover why dynamic and adaptive thresholds are key when monitoring something that is a bit more complex than monitoring when 80% of disk space is used. The presentation will go through a number of use cases where threshold logic needs to be:
- Based on historical data
- Aggregated from multiple service(s) performance data and/or state
- Adaptive when the threshold is process-related
- Based on the time of the day and other calendar profiles
- Expressed as a mathematical function based on series of data to calculate average, derivative, sum, etc.
In the presentation, we will show how this has been achieved using the Bischeck open source framework, www.bischeck.org, integrated with Nagios.
Fernando Honig: System Administrator @ Intel
Fernando is a young, enthusiastic person on the monitoring side. He has 10 years of Linux System Administration and MySQL DBA experience and has worked for EDS and IBM for the last five years.
Nagios Distributed Monitoring for Web Applications Using WebInject
This presentation will cover how we have integrated Nagios and WebInject into a distributed monitoring infrastructure in AWS EC2 using event handlers for making extra checks from different locations, setting a threshold for each location, and setting a fire status for each situation. We also call different APIs from other monitoring tools like Gomez Networks and Pingdom and use those as feeds. For notifications, we integrated CallWithUS (for VoIP calls) and Clickatell for SMS alerts.
Kishore Jalleda: Director of Operations @ IMVU
8+ years experience running large-scale 24×7 web operations using Nagios for monitoring and alerting. I am currently working as “Director of Operations” for IMVU. I really enjoy playing sports like tennis, cricket, ping pong, and volleyball. I love fast cars 🙂
Nagios in the Agile/DevOps/Continuous Deployment World
Running Nagios in an Agile Continuous Deployment (CD/CI) shop like IMVU (See: http://timothyfitz.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/continuous-deployment-at-imvu-doing-the-impossible-fifty-times-a-day/) can be different than running it in a more traditional software development shop. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that things change very quickly, break frequently, go silently unnoticed, features add up instantly, failures cascade without much warning, etc. This means one really needs to adapt and tune their monitoring and alerting processes, procedures, and infrastructure to meet the demands of being truly agile.
This presentation is aimed at exposing how IMVU uses Nagios as its core monitoring and alerting solution for running and enabling our $50 million+ online business. We monitor everything from system-level metrics like CPU to application metrics like how fast a counter is expected to increment for a new feature that was rolled out to 1% of customers to business-level metrics like revenue, registrations, logins/sec and much, much more.
It tries to project how, at IMVU, we try to limit Nagios to doing what it does best and decoupling the rest for scalability and agility reasons. It also tries to show how we have been successful in getting other teams (like engineering, devops, marketing, data, customer service, product, etc.) to use, adopt, or embrace it in some way to make them more self-sufficient and agile.
Alexis Le-Quoc: Co-Founder @ Datadog
I’m the cofounder of Datadog (http://www.datadoghq.com), a monitoring SaaS that aggregates alerts and more generally IT events and metrics from on-premise apps as well as cloud services. Nagios is one of our most successful integrations, and we analyze and detect patterns in our customers’ alerts to help them improve their service quality.
JavaScript Meets Nagios: Interactive Data Exploration for Post-Mortems
Nagios does an excellent job at monitoring services, escalating to them, and alerting people. We, as people, have, on the other hand, strong cognitive biases that overrepresent recent issues (what happened last night, last week). These biases can get in the way of fixing the right things in the long term. In this talk, I present a few different visualizations of the Nagios data that have helped practitioners ground their post-incident actions. Some of these visualizations are aimed at finding daily patterns otherwise buried in notification emails. Others survey longer timeframes to gauge the amount of progress in terms of check coverage, check usefulness, full nights of sleep, and other useful metrics. All these visualizations are built in JavaScript on top of open-source graphing libraries. No prior experience is required, besides familiarity with Nagios.
A Deep Dive into Nagios Analytics
As an aggregator of Nagios alerts (among other things) for a growing number of IT organizations, we have a fairly unique vantage point into patterns of how Nagios is used in the field. In our data set, we find answers to questions such as:
- When do alerts tend to happen (time- and day-wise)?
- What is the typical MTTR?
- Is there a correlation between team size, infrastructure size, and Nagios coverage?
- Is there a correlation between infrastructure complexity and alert storms?
This will be a data-driven session that should be of interest to all Nagios practitioners of all levels of expertise who might want to gauge their own experience against what we have observed.
Paloma Galan: Nagios Community Leader, Spain
Paloma Giraudo Galan has a wide knowledge of testing and monitoring IT systems with open-source solutions. She has worked as a project manager in Madrid for the last six years and has experience in pre-sales monitoring and testing applications. She is finishing the last details of her first start-up application (www.sinbarreras_1870.com) that will allow people with disabilities to explain those places they can go (cinemas, restaurants, etc.).
Case Study: Nagios Deployment in Spain
This presentation will cover Nagios success cases in Spain, where Nagios is deployed, and how it is used.
- Business sectors where Nagios is used
- Different monitoring tools used in Spain
- Deployment in banking and journalistic environments
Jared Bird: Network Security Administrator @ Healthcare Organization
Jared Bird currently works during the day, maintaining a respectable level of security at a large local healthcare organization in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. He has a passion for everything security-related, and in his spare time, he enjoys breaking things, bending the rules, and developing a plot for world dominance.
Nagios: Providing Value Throughout The Organization
This talk will discuss how Nagios can be used to provide value to several areas of an organization. Providing value to areas such as security, audit, and compliance in addition to the traditional infrastructure teams, including ways that Nagios can assist in achieving compliance with several standards and regulations such as PCI, SOX, HIPAA, etc., will be discussed.
BoF Sessions
BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions are informal, ad-hoc sessions where attendees discuss issues that are of interest to them.
BoF Session: Nagios Certification Q&A
We’ll discuss questions relating to Nagios Certification, including the certification tests, requirements, and any other issues you’d like to bring up.
BoF Session: Nagios Partner Programs Q&A
Interested in becoming a Nagios partner? Are you an existing partner who has questions or ideas about our program? Join us at this BoF, where we’ll discuss items relating to our Nagios partner programs, including our reseller program.
