Archived Registration Tiers
| Silver |
| $1,195 USD |
| Gold |
| $1,595 USD |
About The Conference
Welcome to the official site of the third Nagios World Conference in North America that took place in Saint Paul, MN (USA), September 30th–October 3rd, 2013.
Latest Conference News:
Conference videos, presentations, and photos are now available! Attendees and all others who are interested in accessing this year’s conference material can do so by visiting our YouTube channel, Flickr account, and presentation slides page.
YouTube Channel: We have taken all 40+ presentations that were given at this year’s conference and posted them to our YouTube channel. Now, even if you missed a presentation during the conference, you can view it and learn about new products, Nagios innovations, or cool new projects. Check it out here!
Flickr PhotoStream: During the conference, hundreds of photos were taken of presenters, attendees, and all the fun activities that took place over the three-day conference. Take a look and relive the conference experience on Nagios Flickr.
Presentations/SlideShare: All of our presenters and speakers have graciously provided their slides so that everyone has an opportunity to learn from their talk, even after the conference. Presentations can be downloaded below, as well as from the Nagios SlideShare account.
Day 2: October 1st
| Speaker | Presentation Title | Slides and Files |
|---|---|---|
| Ethan Galstad | Keynote | Presentation Video |
| Janice Singh | Visualization of Monitoring Data at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Rodrigue Chakode | Effective Monitoring for Demanding Operations Environments | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Jorge Hernandez | Trust Management in Monitoring Financially Critical Information Infrastructures and Policy Compliance | PDF (Slideshare) |
| David Stern | The Nagios Light-Bar | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Shamas Demoret | Power Up! The Multifaceted Benefits and Capabilities of Nagios | ODP (Slideshare) |
| William Leibzon BOF | Nagios Plugin Thresholds | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Nick Scott | Monitoring Network Traffic With Netflow and Nagios Network Analyzer | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Troy Lea | Leveraging and Understanding Performance Data and Graphs | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Sheeri Cabral | Alerting With MySQL and Nagios | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Eric Loyd | Nagios, AWS, and Hosted VoIP (Automatically Scaling Your Platform To Match Demand) | PPT (Slideshare) |
| William Leibzon | SNMP Monitoring Architecture With Nagios | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Sam Lansing | Getting Started With Nagios XI, Core, and Fusion | ODP (Slideshare) |
| James Clark | Integrating On-Call Schedules with Nagios | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Andy Brist | Visualizing Your Monitoring Data | ODP MP4 (Slideshare) |
| Spenser Reinhardt | Securing Your Nagios Server | ODP (Slideshare) |
Day 3: October 2nd
| Speaker | Presentation Title | Slides and Files |
|---|---|---|
| Eric Stanley | What’s New in Nagios Core 4? | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Thomas Dunbar | Building Technology for Storage System Monitoring | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Fernando Honig | Monitoring: How To Grow Up and Not Worry About Things | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Dan Wittenberg | Scaling Nagios Core 4.x | ODP (Slideshare) |
| John Lowry | Using Nagios as a Security Monitoring Framework | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Shamas Demoret | A Walkthrough Of Nagios XI’s Features and Capabilities | Webinar |
| Dave Williams | The All-in-One Nagios Solution | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Eric Loyd | From “Bare [Virtual] Metal” to Nagios Core on Amazon Web Services | PPTX XLSX (Slideshare) |
| Mike Weber | Leveraging SNMP Extensions with Nagios | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Michael Medin | NSClient++: Whats New | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Eric Stanley and Andy Brist | Nagios APIs | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Sam Lansing | Getting Started With Nagios Incident Manager and Nagios Network Analyzer | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Nick Scott | NCPA: A New Cross-Platform Monitoring Agent | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Spenser Reinhardt | Introduction to Network Monitoring Using Nagios Network Analyzer and NSTI | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Jake Omann | Developing Nagios XI Components and Wizards | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Avleen Vig | Nagios at Etsy: How a Handmade Marketplace Grew its Monitoring with Nagios | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Arup Chakrabarti | What you should Monitor and Alert on in a Production System | KEY |
| Ethan Galstad and Scott Wilkerson | Ask Nagios! An Open Discussion On Future Directions and Technology | PPT (Slideshare) |
Day 4: October 3
| Speaker | Presentation Title | Slides and Files |
|---|---|---|
| Mike Weber | Distributed Monitoring with Raspberry Pi | ODP (Slideshare) |
| John Sellens | Monitoring Remote Locations with Nagios | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Pall Sigurdsson | Adagios: Web Configuration Done Right | SVG |
| Leland Lammert | Nagios in a Multi-Platform Environment | ODP (Slideshare) |
| Yancy Ribbens | Windows Monitoring With Nagios | PPTX (Slideshare) |
| Rodrigo Faria | Helping Nagios Grow in Your Country: Brazil As A Test Case | PPT (Slideshare) |
| Nicolas Brousse | Bringing Business Awareness to Your Operation Team | PDF (Slideshare) |
| Luis Contreras | Case Study: Nagios in WindTelecom World | PPT (Slideshare) |
Conference Information
The Nagios World Conference offers attendees a unique venue to collaborate and enhance their knowledge of everything Nagios—the industry standard in IT infrastructure monitoring. The conference featured knowledgeable speakers that 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
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 2013 conference presentations and workshops below.
Schedule
| Day 1: Monday, September 30th | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Event | ||
| 6:00 p.m.–10:30 p.m. | Registration and Welcome Event | ||
| Day 2: Tuesday, October 1st | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 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: Ethan Galstad (Track 1) | ||
| 10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. | Break | ||
| 10:30 a.m.–11:20 a.m. | Visualization of Monitoring Data at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility: Janice Singh | Effective Monitoring for Demanding Operations Environments: Rodrigue Chakode | |
| 11:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | Trust Management in Monitoring Financial Critical Information Infrastructures and Policy Compliance: Jorge Hernandez | The Nagios Light Bar with David Stern | Power Up! The Multifaceted Benefits and Capabilities of Nagios: Shamas Demoret |
| 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. | Lunch | Lunch BoF Session (12:30–1:00): Nagios Plugin Thresholds: William Leibzon | |
| 2:00 p.m.–2:50 p.m. | Monitoring Network Traffic with Netflow and Nagios Network Analyzer: Nick Scott | Leveraging and Understanding Performance Data and Graphs: Troy Lea | Alerting with MySQL and Nagios: Sheeri Cabral |
| 3:00 p.m.–3:50 p.m. | Nagios, AWS, and Hosted VoIP: (Automatically Scaling Your Platform to Match Demand) by Eric Loyd | SNMP Monitoring Architecture with Nagios: William Leibzon | Getting Started with Nagios XI, Core, and Fusion with Sam Lansing |
| 4:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m. | Break | ||
| 4:30 p.m.–5:20 p.m. | Integrating On-Call Schedules with Nagios: James Clark | Visualizing Your Monitoring Data: Andy Brist | Securing Your Nagios Server: Spenser Reinhardt |
| 7:00 p.m.–11:00 p.m. | Evening Event | ||
| Day 3: Wednesday, October 2nd | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Track 1 | Track 2 | Track 3 |
| 9:00 a.m.–9:50 a.m. | What’s New in Nagios Core 4: Eric Stanley | Building Technology for Storage Systems Monitoring: Thomas Dunbar | Monitoring: How to Grow Up and Not Worry About Things with Fernando Honig |
| 10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. | Break | ||
| 10:30 a.m.–11:20 a.m. | Scaling Nagios Core 4.x: Dan Wittenberg | Using Nagios as a Security Monitoring Framework, John Lowry | *Schedule change A Walkthrough of Nagios XI’s Features and Capabilities by Shamas Demoret |
| 11:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | The All-in-One Nagios Solution: Dave Williams | From “Bare [Virtual] Metal” to Nagios Core on Amazon Web Services, Eric Loyd | Leveraging SNMP Extensions with Nagios: Mike Weber |
| 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. | Lunch | ||
| 2:00 p.m.–2:50 p.m. | NSClient++: What’s New: Michael Medin | Nagios APIs: Eric Stanley and Andy Brist | Getting Started with Nagios Incident Manager and Nagios Network Analyzer by Sam Lansing |
| 3:00 p.m.–3:50 p.m. | NCPA: A New Cross-Platform Monitoring Agent: Nick Scott | Intro to Network Monitoring Using Nagios Network Analyzer and NSTI: Spenser Reinhardt | Developing Nagios XI Components and Wizards: Jake Omann |
| 4:00 p.m.–4:30 p.m. | Break | ||
| 4:30 p.m.–5:20 p.m. | Nagios at Etsy: How a Handmade Marketplace Grew its Monitoring with Nagios: Avleen Vig | What You Should Monitor and Alert on in a Production System: Arup Chakrabarti | *Schedule change Ask Nagios! An Open Discussion on Future Directions and Technology: Ethan Galstad and Scott Wilkerson |
| Day 4: Thursday, October 3rd | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Time | Track 1 | Track 2 | Track 3 |
| 9:00 a.m.–9:50 a.m. | Distributed Monitoring with Raspberry Pi: Mike Weber | Monitoring Remote Locations with Nagios: John Sellens | Adagios: Web Configuration Done Right by Pall Sigurdsson |
| 10:00 a.m.–10:30 a.m. | Break | ||
| 10:30 a.m.–11:20 a.m. | Nagios in a Multi-Platform Environment: Leland Lammert | Windows Monitoring with Nagios: Yancy Ribbens | Helping Nagios Grow in Your Country: Brazil As A Test Case by Rodrigo Faria |
| 11:30 a.m.–12:20 p.m. | Bringing Business Awareness to Your Operation Team: Nicolas Brousse | Case Study: Nagios in WindTelecom World by Luis Contreras | |
| 12:30 p.m.–2:00 p.m. | Lunch BoF Session (12:30–1:30): Nagios APIs: Eric Stanley | Lunch | |
| 2:00 p.m. | Conference Ends | ||
Speakers
Ethan Galstad: Founder @ Nagios
Ethan was the creator of Nagios in its early days as “NetSaint” in 1999. He currently serves as the president of Nagios Enterprises and is involved in development, architectural design, and various management duties.
Keynote
Knowledge Level: All
Ethan will talk about new developments and future directions for Nagios.
Ask Nagios! An Open Discussion on Future Directions and Technology
Knowledge Level: All
Both Scott Wilkerson, IT Manager at Nagios, and Ethan Galstad will answer any questions you might have related to future directions for Nagios product development.
Scott Wilkerson: IT Manager @ Nagios
Scott is the IT manager at Nagios Enterprises. He has a degree in computer programming as well as almost 20 years of experience in the IT industry, including 12 in senior management. Away from work, he enjoys vacationing with his family, hunting, and fishing.
Ask Nagios! An Open Discussion on Future Directions and Technology
Knowledge Level: All
Both Scott Wilkerson, IT Manager at Nagios, and Ethan Galstad will answer any questions you might have related to future directions for Nagios product development.
Unlocking the Power of Nagios XI’s Advanced Features
This presentation will go over utilizing the advanced features and capabilities of the commercial Nagios XI monitoring product, including the extensibility of the product to be customized to meet the needs of any organization. Additionally, take a sneak peek at some additional features coming in the 2014 release of Nagios XI.
Michael Medin: NSClient++ Developer
Michael Medin is a senior architect and open-source developer and has, among other things, written NSClient++, a popular agent for monitoring Windows-based servers from Nagios. In his not-so-spare time, he works as a consultant building middleware on Oracle, mainly using Java, XML, and various Web Service and REST technologies. When he is not working diligently at his computer, he is often found riding his mountain bike along some rocky singletrack in the glorious Swedish countryside.
NSClient++: What’s New
Knowledge Level: Medium
Michael will introduce new and upcoming features of NSClient++, such as real-time log file analysis and real-time system monitoring. He will also introduce the new remote agent-less monitoring features as well as protocol enhancements and distributed setups.
Fernando Honig: IT Operations @ Intel Corporation
Fernando has 10 years of Linux system administration experience. During the last two years, I have worked at Intel Corporation on the monitoring of web applications. He, among others, started to use different tools like Nagios for monitoring the whole infrastructure. Fernando also works as a sysadmin for different clients in Argentina, mostly newspapers and web portals. He loves soccer and travels around the world.
Monitoring: How to Grow Up and Not Worry About Things
Knowledge Level: Medium
The first part of the presentation will show in depth how to enable or disable hosts and services from devices that are created automatically with Amazon EC2 auto-scaling in a cloud infrastructure. It will also show how important hostgroups and servicegroups are and the implementation of those for diverse kinds of customers. The second part will show how we can integrate Nagvis with Nagios using the mklive_status broker in order to make awesome maps and even more maps automatically. This part will also show how easy it is to join different Nagios systems on only one map and have the whole picture of our systems in one shot.
David Stern: Facilities Manager @ Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab
David Stern traces his use of Nagios back to the NetSaint days. He’s set up dozens of highly tailored Nagios installations within NASA and the Department of Defense over the course of the last few decades. He’s also innovated many unique plug-ins and visual apps.
The Nagios Light Bar
Knowledge Level: Medium
This is a case study of enabling a network-attached light bar to show the current Nagios state. In addition to showing a green or red light, it creates an audible tone the first time any new alerts occur. It also allows staff to acknowledge each alert, thereby indicating if there are any unacknowledged events.
Dave Williams: Technical Architect @ Bull Information Systems Ltd.
I have worked for a number of computer manufacturers and software houses for over 30 years. I design and deliver IT solutions that integrate networks with storage and server architectures. I have been using Nagios since my first port of NetSaint to AIX. I use EMC, NetApp, Cisco, Juniper, PowerPC, Intel, and high-performance computing in my everyday job. I have recently begun to evangelize about the Raspberry Pi microPC system.
The All-in-One Nagios Solution
Knowledge Level: Medium
The presentation details the implementation of Nagios on a Raspberry Pi with the addition of Asterisk and other systems to deliver an all-in-one monitoring solution that fits on a VESA mount on the back of a monitor. Wireless, wired, and 3G network connections are supported. A demonstration system will be part of the presentation.
Janice Singh: Web Developer @ NASA Ames/CSC
Janice Singh has been working with Nagios since 2009. In her spare time, she shops for shoes, eats dark chocolate, and watches football.
Visualization of Monitoring Data at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing Facility
Knowledge Level: Medium
See how NAS (NASA Advanced Supercomputing) used an in-house solution to display data in a completely different way. The NAS facility includes several supercomputers, archival storage systems, Lustre filesystems, and NFS filesystems as an integrated system. If any one piece is down, it can affect the whole facility. Therefore, the visualization provided with Nagios did not meet the needs of NAS, so another layer was added to create a quick view of the system status.
Jorge Higueros: CEO @ Consulmatic
Jorge Higueros, who holds a Master of Computer Security, has Security Offensive certifications, has eight years of experience in implementations of COBIT, ISO 20000, and ISO 27002, and has designed a framework for enterprise risk management called SIGRE (System Enterprise Risk Management). He is currently president of the CSA Central America Chapter, marketing director of the ISACA Guatemala Chapter, and chairman of Consulmatic Company in the Latin American Region.
Trust Management in Monitoring Financial Critical Information Infrastructures and Policy Compliance with Nagios XI
Knowledge Level: Medium/Advanced
This presentation will cover how Nagios XI can satisfy the needs of financial IT infrastructures that are characterized by strict security requirements.
Troy Lea: IT Consultant and Nagios Developer
Self-described jack of all trades. My background is in Microsoft products, starting in 1995 with DOS and Windows 3.11. My most recent venture started in 2006, when I implemented a hosted environment using VMware ESX and Windows 2003/Exchange 2003 based on the “Microsoft Hosted Messaging and Collaboration” solution. These days, everyone calls this cloud computing. In 2009, when looking at monitoring products for the hosted environment, I came across Nagios XI. Currently, I am taking a break from work while I relax after eight years at one company. I enjoy a good game of darts, playing Minecraft, and keeping fit.
Leveraging and Understanding Performance Data and Graphs
Knowledge Level: Medium/Advanced
In the world of monitoring, there is more to Nagios than sending alerts because a server is about to run out of hard disk space. Collecting and storing performance data is one of the most useful features of Nagios. With this information, you can get an understanding of your environment’s day-to-day trends. Analyzing this data can be very helpful, perhaps to look at growth or identify performance bottlenecks. This session is about understanding how performance data is stored on the backend and how Nagios accesses it. Topics include understanding the.rrd and.xml files; understanding how pnp generates graphs; creating custom graph templates in pnp; and writing plugins that will output the performance data you want.
Yancy Ribbens: Developer @ Nagios Enterprises
Yancy is a developer at Nagios Enterprises. He holds a degree in computer networking and plans to pursue further education in the area of computer science. While working his way through school, Yancy has nearly 5 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.
Windows Monitoring
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will cover topics relating to monitoring Windows environments, including Active Directory integration and the automatic deployment of agents to Windows machines.
Nick Scott: Developer @ Nagios Enterprises
Nick Scott is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He attends the University of Minnesota, 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.
NCPA: A New Cross-Platform Monitoring Agent
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will cover NCPA, a new, cross-platform monitoring agent that can be easily deployed on Linux, Unix, Mac, and Windows machines. NCPA’s capabilities, including active and passive checks, customer plugins, remote configuration, standard protocol, and more, will be discussed in detail. Additionally, the presentation will cover how NCPA compares to other available monitoring agents.
Monitoring Network Traffic with NetFlow and Nagios Network Analyzer
Knowledge Level: All
Nick will demonstrate Nagios Network Analyzer’s features and how it can be used to provide deep insight into network traffic.
Jake Omann: Developer @ Nagios Enterprises
Jake Omann is a developer at Nagios Enterprises. He is a recent Winona State University graduate with a degree in computer science. When not working or outside, he likes building websites, developing web-based applications, and creating computer graphics using Photoshop.
Developing Nagios XI Components and Wizards
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will demonstrate how you can easily build components and wizards to customize and enhance the capabilities of your Nagios XI monitoring instance.
Spenser Reinhardt: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises
Spenser is a member of the technical support team at Nagios Enterprises. Past positions in both large and small organizations allow for a wide variety of technical situations and understanding. He volunteers his time to do technical presentations and classes with local security groups, such as Def Con and OWASP. In his free time, he enjoys sci-fi books and movies, cycling, PC gaming, and mild-mannered hackery.
Securing Your Nagios Server
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
This presentation will cover best practices, methodologies, and tools for securing your Nagios server against external threats.
Intro to Network Monitoring Using Nagios Network Analyzer and NSTI
Knowledge Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Nagios Network Analyzer is for collecting network flow information and determining what is using your bandwidth and where it’s going! Nagios SNMP Trap Interface and how it collects and displays information from SNMPTT (SNMP Trap Translator) and SNMP traps to give you an easy-to-understand view of traps in your network. Basic network monitoring with SNMP includes basic troubleshooting, determining interface state and usage, and correlating this information with NNA and NSTI for greater overall understanding.
Andy Brist: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises
Andy is a member of the technical support team at Nagios Enterprises. He is the former owner of a PC repair shop and an avid technologist. He enjoys hacking about in Gentoo Linux’s unstable upstream, disassembling new gear, and tinkering about with WebGL and JavaScript. His hobbies include playing the tin whistle when no one is around, swing dancing with his wife, and sophisticated jousting with those lacking the prudence to avoid it.
Visualizing Your Monitoring Data
Knowledge Level: All
This presentation will cover various data visualizations that are available for Nagios, including NagVis and 3-D visualizations. APIs that are available for creating your own custom visualizations will also be discussed.
Ludmil Miltchev: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises
Ludmil is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He likes Linux and open-source, and he enjoys testing software and finding bugs.
Troubleshooting Common Issues in Nagios
Knowledge Level: Beginner
Ludmil will cover common issues that new users often run into with a new Nagios deployment. This presentation is a great resource for new users just getting started with Nagios. The presentation will be mainly focused on Nagios XI, but some aspects will also apply to Nagios Core.
Shamas Demoret: Sales Tech @ Nagios Enterprises
Shamas is a sales tech at Nagios Enterprises. Science fiction and cyberpunk literature as early inspirations for his love of technology. In his free time, he likes to read, draw, play PVP online games and strategy board games, and hone various skills.
Power Up! The Multifaceted Benefits and Capabilities of Nagios
Knowledge Level: Beginner
This presentation will provide a high-level overview of Nagios Core and Nagios XI, including product capabilities, high-level concepts, and feature demonstrations. Recommend as a starting point for new users.
A Walkthrough of Nagios XI’s Features and Capabilities
Knowledge Level: All
This presentation will include a walkthrough of Nagios XI’s key features and capabilities. Recommended for new users as well as experienced Nagios Core administrators interested in Nagios XI.
Sam Lansing: Tech @ Nagios Enterprises
Sam is a member of the tech team at Nagios Enterprises. He has been a geek since he could pick up a screwdriver and open a desktop case, and 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 studying, gaming, and hanging out with roommates and family.
Getting Started with Nagios XI, Core, and Fusion
Knowledge Level: Beginner
This presentation will show you how to get started monitoring using either Nagios Core or Nagios XI, as well as how to use Nagios Fusion as a central monitoring dashboard. Sam will demonstrate product installation, initial configuration, and setup, as well as how to monitor your first things. Recommended for new users.
Getting Started with Nagios Incident Manager and Nagios Network Analyzer
Knowledge Level: Beginner
This presentation will show you how to get started with Nagios Incident Manager and Nagios Network Analyzer. Sam will demonstrate product installation, initial configuration, and setup, as well as how to get started using each product. Recommended for new users.
Eric Stanley: Nagios Developer
Eric was first introduced to technology in a computer science class in high school. He has a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Minnesota and currently holds a certification as a Red Hat Certified Engineer. He began his career as a software developer, working with early databases, and then as an embedded software developer, writing in C. In the late 1990s, he switched his emphasis to IT after being introduced to Linux, although he maintains an active involvement in software development.
What’s New in Nagios Core 4?
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
In this presentation, Eric will provide an overview of the new features and capabilities in Nagios Core 4, including performance improvements, worker threads, and distributed monitoring.
Nagios APIs
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
This talk will cover the various APIs that are present in both Nagios Core and Nagios XI, as well as how to leverage them to integrate monitoring data with your own applications.
Luis Contreras: Community Leader @ Nagios
Luis Contreras works as 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 Linux Certification Coordinator, CISL (Congreso Internacional de Software Libre) from Argentina as Ambassador for the Dominican Republic for this congress, and recently the MongoDB Community. He has worked as a system administrator for 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 also offers Linux and Nagios consulting.
Case Study: Nagios in the WindTelecom World
Knowledge Level: Beginner/All
This presentation will cover three success cases of Nagios implementations on WindTelecom and how Nagios XI has helped the company save money and time in their operations.
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 OurSQL: The MySQL Database Community Podcast, available on iTunes. She was the first MySQL Oracle ACE Director and is the founder (and current treasurer) of Technocation, Inc., a not-for-profit organization providing resources and educational grants for IT professionals. She wrote the MySQL 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 SQL and Relational Theory.
Alerting with MySQL and Nagios
Knowledge Level: Beginner
There are many Nagios plugins for MySQL, but this plugin optimizes statistics gathering so that adding variable checks does not add a linear amount of database stress. This session will walk you through newly available templates for the most common variable checks so you can quickly monitor for the most frequent MySQL problems. This session will also include how to use and extend this set of Nagios plugins to more effectively monitor your MySQL instance.
Rodrigo Faria: Community Leader @ Nagios
Rodrigo Faria is a member of the Nagios community and has 15 years of experience in telecommunications. He is an independent security consultant and works on large telecommunications projects with Cisco, Fortinet, Juniper, Checkpoint, SonicWall, routing, IPS, UTM, etc. He has worked with Nagios since version 0.99 of Nagios Core. He is from Brazil and loves soccer.
Helping Nagios Grow in Your Country: Brazil as a Test Case
Knowledge Level: Beginner
The presentation shows how the Nagios community has grown in Brazil and how I helped Nagios grow in my country with a community blog. My presentation has a method with an analysis of the number of users on the website and understanding what users need to understand Nagios architecture and start-up first. This presentation includes a bit about success cases with Nagios Core and Nagios XI in Brazil.
John Lowry: Security Engineer @ Hypermedia Systems
John is a security engineer for a managed hosting provider, working on a dedicated security team that monitors network security, web app security, PII, and PCI requirements. He is the sysadmin for the security team, monitoring the systems they require to get their job done as well as writing tools for better reporting and alerting of possible breaches or active attacks. John has worked in IT in a security or systems administration-related capacity since 2006 and has been using Nagios since day one. He has not given much to the Nagios Core project or open-source in general, aside from helping others out on mailing lists and a few Nagios plugins, so he also feels like he owes a lot of people beer at this conference.
Using Nagios as a Security Monitoring Framework
Knowledge Level: Medium
Good security monitoring is an extension of good basic monitoring. From a one-man sysadmin shop to a large corporation with a dedicated security team that has 24×7 staff, one needs to know what is happening on the network. From HTTP 500 error messages to network switches being overloaded because of a virus outbreak to IPS alerts to syslog events that indicate an intrusion Nagios can be the service that lets you know when a security event has occurred. Using passive checks, SNMP traps, and a bit of programming, this talk will show you how to leverage Nagios as a security monitoring tool.
Pall Sigurdsson: Nagios Consultant @ Opin Kerfi
Since 2004, Pall Sigurdsson has been an open-source consultant with a focus on open monitoring tools and configuration management systems like Puppet. Currently, Pall’s focus is on improving the Nagios community by contributing to projects such as Okconfig, Pynag, and Adagios.
Adagios: Web Configuration Done Right
Knowledge Level: Basic/Beginner
Adagios is a Nagios addon that is designed to make Nagios management in enterprise environments easier and more efficient. It features a web-based object configuration (with no database backend), a set of service templates, a web API, and an alternative status/dashboard view that integrates natively with LiveStatus and pnp4nagios. This presentation will focus on the problem domain that Adagios is trying to help with and how Adagios can help enterprises reach best practices.
Thomas Dunbar: Storage and Database Coordination @ Intermountain Healthcare
Having retired early from Virginia Tech’s Oracle DBA group, which uses Nagios as their primary monitoring framework, I was recruited to help Intermountain Healthcare’s Storage team better support the DBA groups at IHC. While we use commercial monitoring tools here at IHC, the day-to-day work and on-call tasks of the storage team require flexibility and configurability not available in many tools. Given my open-source background (I’m in the Linux Credits file for early supporting work there related to TeX), I naturally looked to Nagios Core as a framework for building our specific storage monitoring resources.
Building Technology for Storage Systems Monitoring
Knowledge Level: Medium
Coherence, continuity, and clarity are three general principles of building technology that are shown through a specific example of monitoring different storage systems (SAN, NetApp, and other backup and recovery systems) to meet the needs of on-call staff while also feeding monitoring tools that meet the needs of upper management. Will also address issues related to the long-term manageability of the resulting Nagios framework in a high-availability environment with over 4 petabytes of storage and multiple Oracle databases over 15 terabytes in size.
Leland Lammert: Chief Scientist @ Omnitec Corporation
Dr. Lammert is a technologist specializing in open-source software and Chief Scientist at Omnitec Corporation. One of Omnitec’s specialties is creating Nagios systems in a multi-platform environment (Windows, Linux, and Mac) using active checks.
Nagios in a Multi-Platform Environment
Knowledge Level: Medium
There are many ways to connect remote systems to Nagios, but one way provides maximum flexibility: reverse SSH tunnels. Active checks, SSH sessions for troubleshooting, and on-demand RDP and VNC are all easily manageable with an SSH tunnel. We will show how to create and manage these connections on multiple platforms, as well as examples of Nagios checks used in this environment.
Marcel Hecko: DevOps @ theregister.co.uk
I started a not-for-profit organization developing open wireless networks all around Europe during high school. I started to be interested in open source afterwards. Did consultations for banking and heavy industry on open-source technologies. I deployed and maintained one of the biggest installations of Nagios and Zabbix in Slovakia for the largest bank in Slovakia. Now a DevOps lead for the Register.co.uk news portal, with the tech team based in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Extending Nagios: Inputs and Outputs
Knowledge Level: Medium
How to write plugins to send monitored information into Nagios from different systems, applications, and non-standard sources Examples of how to write extensions in Perl, PHP, and Shell scripts and how to present information from Nagios for different groups of end users using open-source presentation software to create great-looking dashboards.
Eric Loyd: Founder and CEO @ Bitnetix
Eric Loyd is the founder and CEO of Bitnetix Incorporated, an IT consulting and systems integration company located in Rochester, New York. Bitnetix has been providing VoIP service to small businesses and non-profits since 2007. In 2012, Bitnetix formed SmartVox and redesigned their global VoIP service offering to take advantage of the AWS platform. Mr. Loyd presented Agios Implementation Case: Eastman Kodak at Nagios World 2012. He has over 25 years of IT experience, including 10 years in senior management, and is a musician, photographer, amateur astronomer, and aspiring serial entrepreneur.
Nagios, AWS, and Hosted VoIP, or How to Automatically Scale Your Platform to Match Your Demand
Knowledge Level: Advanced/Expert
SmartVox provides hosted voice over IP (VoIP) services to small businesses and non-profit customers in the US and abroad by leveraging Amazon Web Services (AWS) virtual servers, storage, and databases. Each customer gets their own dedicated, private AWS server. We’ll look at how SmartVox implements Nagios to dynamically adjust this platform to size itself to the current demands of customers and why it makes sense to scale VoIP services in near-real time.
From “Bare [Virtual] Metal” to Nagios Core on Amazon Web Services
Knowledge Level: Basic/Beginner
We’ll start with a brand new Amazon Web Service EC2 virtual instance and actually install Nagios Core, do some basic configuration and security hardening, install check_mk, and then have it monitor something. All right there, live, at the conference.
William Leibzon: Open-Source Consultant
William is an open-source consultant who has contributed to Nagios Core and has been developing plugins and addons for Nagios for the last 10 years. He has helped to setup monitoring and systems architecture for many companies and currently works part-time as a cloud systems architect at an online gaming startup. He is also pursuing a PhD degree at the University of California, where his research interests include parallel and distributed computing, games theory, graph theory, cognitive science, and systems modeling in social science. He enjoys hiking and camping and does archaeology work as a hobby in the summer.
SNMP Monitoring Architecture with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
SNMP is sometimes feared for being a not-so-simple monitoring protocol. However, as a standard, it has numerous times demonstrated its value and is the primary method of monitoring network equipment. All operating systems also support it. I will first discuss the SNMP protocol, its data structures, and its security features. Then we will discuss how to use Nagios with existing SNMP plugins and how to write new SNMP plugins in Perl while optimizing SNMP requests to minimize check completion time. This presentation is aimed at those using Nagios in a Linux or other Unix environment where standard Net-SNMP tolls and libraries are available.
BoF Session: Nagios Plugin Thresholds
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
This is to be a discussion session to get feedback from Nagios users and developers on the proposed Nagios Plugin Threshold Specification: https://github.com/willixix/nagios-plugins/wiki/New-Threshold-Syntax. Plus, in general, to get feedback on what people may want to see as far as standardization efforts on Nagios plugin syntax or any features that people would like all plugins to support. The session is supposed to be kind of similar to IETF BoF sessions. I’ll lead the session as I’m the one requesting it and will ask for volunteers to write a summary for the Nagios-plugins mail list.
James Clark: Systems Monitoring Administrator @ Big Apparel Company
I have been in the IT industry for over 22 years and have been using Nagios for the past 10 years. I used XI during the final few years at my last job and quickly got it purchased when I was hired as the systems monitoring administrator at a large apparel company.
Integrating On-Call Schedules with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
This presentation will demonstrate how the team for the large retail company I work for integrated the data from our on-call information with Nagios. This integration affects who is alerted for host and service issues.
Arup Chakrabarti: Operations Engineering Team Lead @ PagerDuty
Arup has been working in the space of software operations since 2007. He started as an operations engineer at Amazon, helping to reduce customer defects with multiple teams for the Amazon Marketplace. Since then, he has managed and built operations teams at Amazon and Netflix to help improve availability and reliability. He currently works at PagerDuty, where he is the operations engineering team lead.
What You Should Monitor and Alert on in a Production System
Knowledge Level: Medium
It is tempting to look at every graph on every system because all of our monitoring tools are producing more and more data. In this talk, we will go through why that is a bad idea and some of the strategies you can use to filter out useful metrics that are actionable.
Daniel Wittenberg: Manager IT R&D Monitoring @ IPsoft
Dan has been a Unix/Linux admin for over 18 years and a NetSaint/Nagios user for almost 12 of those. Having worked as a consultant in many industries has given him a broad range of monitoring expertise. He has written many custom plugins and event brokers, and he has also contributed patches and updates to many others. He is also an avid open-source promoter and uses it whenever possible. Having managed environments for Fortune 500 companies and ones with over 600 Nagios servers and over a million service checks has given him a unique perspective on scaling and integration.
Scaling Nagios Core 4.x
Knowledge Level: Advanced/Expert
We’ll cover a brief overview of the Nagios Core 3.x scaling items that I’ve learned from previous years and then review what has changed with Nagios Core 4.x and how migrating to Nagios Core 4 can help with performance and integration.
Rodrigue Chakode: Research Engineer @ SysFera
Rodrigue Chakode holds a PhD in computing science. Before his PhD, he worked for a consulting company integrating IT monitoring and backup solutions for data centers. A strong supporter of free software and passionate about open-source monitoring, he started in 2010 writing the first lines of the software that has become RealOpInsight. Currently, he works as a research engineer for a company providing open-source software for distributed computing and cloud computing.
Effective Monitoring for Demanding Operations Environments
Knowledge Level: Intermediate/Advanced
In today’s IT infrastructure, there are an increasingly large number of hardware and software components to monitor. To be effective, it is important for administrators to quickly assess the real impact of incidents. Hence, administrators need to avoid or limit false alerts. Additionally, when incidents arise, they should quickly evaluate their impacts to be able to prioritize recovery from incidents that have higher impacts on services. These are crucial points that need to be addressed in demanding operational environments. In this talk, we will show how to achieve this purpose by focusing on high-level services (business processes and services provided to end-users) instead of individual checks. Our explanation will be guided by examples set up on top of Nagios, thanks to RealOpInsight. Business process-centric, RealOpInsight enables network administrators to focus on useful alerts. Indeed, thanks to their high-level hierarchical organization of services and advanced rules and algorithms to aggregate and propagate incidents, they are able to handle the severity of incidents in a fine-grained way.
Mike Weber: Lead Trainer and President @ Cybermontana Inc.
Mike Weber provided the official Nagios training, including basic and advanced classes for Nagios. Cybermontana Inc., which was a Nagios training partner and had provided training for CentOS, Ubuntu, and Postfix mail servers since 1999.
Leveraging SNMP Extensions with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
The MIB for SNMP extension is NET-SNMP-EXTEND-MIB, which can be used as an agentless option for monitoring. This MIB will provide the option to query commands or shell scripts for metrics that are created from the scripts. Basically, this allows SNMP to be used to execute any scripts on a remote host to use for monitoring and replaces other options like NRPE, which require an agent. Practical examples on how to use extend scripts for Nagios monitoring and for event handlers will be shown in the session.
Distributed Monitoring with Raspberry Pi
Knowledge Level: Intermediate
The Raspberry Pi (Model B) is a 700 MHz, 512 MB RAM, ARM-based machine that has enough resources to perform monitoring tasks for Nagios. This presentation will demonstrate how to set up a Raspberry Pi, a $35 server, using a distributed model. The distributed model is built upon Mod-Gearman to harness the total potential of the Raspberry Pi. A working model will be presented.
Avleen Vig: Staff Operations Engineer @ Etsy
Avleen is a staff operations engineer at Etsy, where he spends much of his time growing the infrastructure for selling knitted gloves and cross-stitch periodic tables. Before joining Etsy, he worked at several large tech companies, including EarthLink and Google, as well as a number of successful small startups.
Nagios at Etsy: How a Handmade Marketplace Grew its Monitoring with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
Over the last five years at Etsy, we have invested heavily in using Nagios as our primary monitoring system. As our systems grew in number and complexity, we found a number of traditional monitoring methodologies breaking down. In this talk, you will learn about how we scaled our monitoring and the practices we use to reduce alert fatigue, increase visibility, and bring in data from multiple sources into one monitoring system.
Nicolas Brousse: Director of Operations Engineering @ TubeMogul
Nicolas is director of operations engineering at Tubemogul. He worked for the past 12 years 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 800 servers and handle over 10 billion HTTP requests per day.
Bringing Business Awareness to Your Operation Team
Knowledge Level: Basic
Managing an infrastructure with a global footprint can be a challenging task for a centralized operations team. Bringing business awareness to your operation is key to success. In this talk, you will learn how the TubeMogul Operation Team easily manages its on-call rotation, how we centralize monitoring information from multiple datacenters for efficient on-call, and how we define our business priorities with a business-focused dashboard.
John Sellens: System Administrator and Developer
John Sellens has been a system administrator for over 25 years and has been teaching tutorials on Nagios and monitoring since 2001. He has implemented Nagios in many different environments over the years and has created or “improved” more plugins and related tools than he can remember. He is the developer of the MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance and is a member of the IT/Operations team at FreshBooks in Toronto.
Monitoring Remote Locations with Nagios
Knowledge Level: Medium
Monitoring a single, connected network is straightforward. When you need to monitor various locations with different access and connectivity challenges, things get a little more complicated. This talk will cover the various methods that can be used to monitor hosts and services in remote locations, whether or not they are under your direct control, using techniques and tools such as SSH tunnels, NRPE, NRDP, and reflection. This talk will cover both generic approaches for remote monitoring and how these methods are implemented in the MonBOX Remote Monitoring Appliance.
