Zabbix Conference 2016 Agenda

Official Agenda of Zabbix Conference 2016, that took place on September 9-10 in Riga, Latvia

Explore the agenda in full, with all the videos and presentations!

Zabbix Conference 2016

Day 1 – September 9

09:00

Registration for Conference Delegates

10:00

Opening Speech

Alexei Vladishev

Founder and CEO, Zabbix, Latvia

Alexei is the author of Zabbix, an enterprise class open source monitoring solution, and also the founder of Zabbix LLC, the company developing Zabbix. Alexei will talk about new exciting features of Zabbix 3.2 event correlation module aimed to simplify large scale monitoring and root cause analysis. Also sharing his thoughts about future plans in regards of Zabbix 3.4 and further releases.

Conference video & presenations

10:40

Zabbix for HPC Cluster Support

Mikhail is working on High Performance Computing platform support and is in charge of remote management of a team, analysing current HPC platform and finding opportunities for further improvements, supporting and monitoring existing HPC platform, and lifecycle management of HPC software.

Mikhail Serkov, Senior HPC Engineer/Delivery Manager

EPAM Systems, USA

For the last two years I've been working in Cambridge (US) in Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research (NIBR) on a project related to a support of HPC cluster infrastructure and users. We're using Zabbix for HPC cluster monitoring (more than 1000 nodes, 10000+ cores, GPU cores, etc). In this presentation we will cover interesting use cases of Zabbix for HPC cluster, as it's not a regular infrastructure monitoring. We will talk about some challenges we have in HPC monitoring, how Zabbix helps us to work with scientists as well as present some solutions, which might be interesting for Zabbix community.

Conference video & presenations

11:20

Insight in Mechanics of Zabbix Modules

Gleb will talk about loadable modules and the new “superpowers” they provide in Zabbix 3.2. He is going to shed some light on what’s happening under the hood and how to make Zabbix and module coexistence as harmonic as it can get. When you understand how this heavy machinery works, extending Zabbix becomes a joyful experience.

Gleb Ivanovsky

C Developer at Zabbix, Latvia

Gleb has a BSc in Applied mathematics and physics and a MSc in Physics of high-temperature processes, and most notably is the brain behind the new trend prediction functionality introduced with Zabbix 3.0.

Conference video & presenations

11:40

Coffee Break

12:10

Zabbix at Nokia - Case Study

We will explore a fairly complicated Zabbix environment at one division in Nokia. Having several different Zabbix versions in use and a lot of custom products monitored, it is a place one can get lost in easily. We'll discuss JMX monitoring, approaches to keep notification configuration simple and notifications useful, different usecases for the Zabbix API and a lot of other topics. The importance of the SSL compliance will be covered along with some of the many ways custom solutions are monitored.

Rihards Olups

Nokia, Latvia

Rihards has worked in the IT sector for more than 15 years. He has had a chance to work with various systems, and most of that time has been spent with open source solutions. "richlv" is a permanent resident of the Zabbix IRC channel and an active Zabbix community member.

Conference video & presenations

12:50

SHORT TALK: Monitoring Cloud Applications Using Zabbix

Sumit Goel

Lead Monitoring & Automation Engineer, at Salesforce.com, USA

With global shift towards flexibility of cloud there are different demands on monitoring availability and performance of applications provided in the cloud. There are obvious limitations in accessing components of app hosted by third party run outside of internal environment. Same time there are opportunities of using vendor API and status page. In Salesforce, one of the most innovative company in the world by Forbes and one of the biggest cloud service provider, we understand the need of customer to be able to see in real time availability and performance of cloud application. In the following presentation we're going to list and describe multiple ways of monitoring cloud apps. Some of the methods are: building in web monitoring using Curl, web browser automation tools like Selenium, external scipts (reading vendor status dashboard) and API calls to the app.

Conference video & presenations

13:10

SHORT TALK: Zabbix Meets OPS Control / Rundeck

Zabbix is an excellent tool to do network monitoring and to alert if something bad happens. But Zabbix can do more. An underestimated feature of Zabbix is its ability to perform actions in addition to simple notifications. However, this requires to precisly setup those actions within zabbix, which is not always an easy task and might duplicate existing work. So what if Zabbix actually worked in concert with an external taskrunner / jobscheduler that is build to do exactly this: run a task or action against a host and report its outcome? Zabbix would perform the same well defined steps that an ops member would perform in case of certain failures using this kind of tool. A well know example of this kind of software is "Rundeck" which is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0.

Wolfgang Alper

CEO at IntelliTrend IT-Services GmbH, Germany

Wolfgang Alper began his IT career in 1988. In 2005, he launched the first network monitoring projects based on Zabbix. Now Wolfgang is a Zabbix Certified Trainer and IntelliTrend GmbH is a Certified Partner of Zabbix, having become one of the leading specialists in the field of network monitoring focusing on "large-scale network monitoring" projects and related customer-specific developments.

Conference video & presenations

13:30

Lunch

15:00

Monitoring Mesos, Docker, Containers with Zabbix

At DBC we are running docker and other container types in a mesos/marathon cluster environment. I will demonstrate how we collect statistics, logs etc. and monitor this environment, showing configuration examples, data flows and templates. Some of the covered topics:

Mesos master and agents
Marathon Framework
Docker engine
Containers
Zookeeper
Elasticserach/ELK

Erik Skytthe

System Specialist at DBC A/S, Denmark

Erik is a System Monitoring, Management and Network Specialist, Analyst and Linux Admin. Erik has been working with Linux, Unix, Network and Security for more than two decades and he is currently engaged in infrastructure analysis, design and integration, implementation and operation of data center and customers networks as well as technical project management and vendor management.

Conference video & presenations

15:40

Nagios to Zabbix Migration

A case study on how we learned to stop worrying and love Zabbix, in a in depth migration process from Nagios to Zabbix.

Alexander Naydenko

Alexander is working in IT support and management since 2002. He has experience working on many Linux, *nix and Windows infrastructure projects of different scale, from single server to a national scale. Having experience working on bank, retail, security, energy, medicine, scientific and other projects he is currently engaged in infrastructure support, analysis and consulting, as well as project management.

Conference video & presenations

16:20

Coffee Break

16:50

SHORT TALK: Trouble Ticket Integration with Zabbix in Large Environment

Large Environments rely on TroubleTicket tool and HelpDesk for managing IT issues. Bridging Zabbix with over 5000 servers and HelpDesk manually is a painful and impossible project. In this presentation we will cover how we may integrate Zabbix with HelpDesk, the architecture and what are the issues specially in Large Environments.
As an example, we will cover the case study of Zabbix - ServiceNow integration, as it was developped for SwissLife and released as OpenSource.

Alain Ganuchaud

CEO at Cool Monitoring, France

Alain comes from the company Hewlett-Packard, developing around HP OpenView, especially in the area of databases. Then he established two OpenSources companies, focusing on major accounts. And for already 7 years, being a Zabbix Certified Trainer, he is providing Zabbix consultancy, especially in the field of Banking and Insurance and in large environment companies.

Conference video & presenations

17:10

SHORT TALK: Zabbix Action Simulator

The action simulator used to be available for 2.0 and 2.2, but not for 2.4 and consequently 3.0, mostly due to the possible shift of the API into a different component and the introduction of custom expressions in action conditions. Now the first version is here. We will talk about the intention to bring the action simulator back, as it solves some important problems which may occur in more complex installations.

Volker Fröhlich

GNU/Linux Engineer, Austria

Volker Fröhlich is a System Administrator. In his time off he is a RPM packager with Fedora and Openstreetmap mapper. "volter" is a permanent resident of the Zabbix IRC channel.

Conference video & presenations

Day 2 – September 10

08:30

Zabbix Workshops / Zabbix Exam

WORKSHOPS

During the conference top Zabbix experts will be running Workshops focusing on Zabbix features.
You will have an opportunity to watch live demos and participate in hands-on Zabbix usage examples.

Track1

8:30-9:10 - Scale with Zabbix Partitioning
9:15-9:55 - Master Low Level Discovery

Track 2

8:30-9:10 - Hands On Trend Prediction
9:15-9:55 - Guide to Extending Zabbix + Scripts and API

(IMPORTANT! All participants must bring their own laptops with Zabbix pre-installed)

EXAM

Zabbix Conference will also offer a fantastic opportunity to become Zabbix 3.0 Certified, as we will provide you with a chance to pass Zabbix 3.0 exam right at the venue!

If you currently hold any of the following certificates, you are welcome to apply for the exam:
✔ Zabbix 3.0 Attendance certificate
✔ Zabbix 2.2 Certified Specialist and/or Professional certificate
✔ Zabbix 2.0 Certified Specialist and/or Zabbix 2.0 for Large Environments certificate*
(* Zabbix 2.0 certificate holders can take the 3.0 exam only at the conference.)

10:00

Zen and The Art of Zabbix Template Design

Zabbix monitoring solution can help bring balance to your organisation's IT landscape. However, the success greatly depends on the templates you use to setup your monitoring system. As any Zabbix veteran will tell you, the default templates don't really suffice for any setup other than a proof-of-concept. How then do you set about creating your own templates? Following practical examples, we'll discuss some of the design decisions that need to be made to achieve template perfection.

Raymond Kuiper

IT Infrastructure Specialist at, Netco Technology, The Netherlands

As an IT Infrastructure Specialist with a strong focus on monitoring, networks and operations, Raymond started using Zabbix 1.1.3 in 2006 when the company he was working for needed a flexible, integrated solution to monitor servers and network availability and performance. Over the years Raymond has become a keen supporter of Zabbix and has introduced the tool to various organizations and administrators. He also likes to hang out in #zabbix on Freenode to help out other Zabbix users.

Conference video & presenations

10:40

Log management ELISA controlled by Zabbix

Datasys ELISA log management is robust, powerful, yet inexpensive solution for collection, correlation and analysis of logs. Core system consists of the Elasticsearch “noSQL“ database and the web user interface Kibana, which provides high comfort for analysis of detected security incidents and relevant logs. It is common that the database ElasticSearch is distributed to multiple servers to achieve load balancing and high availability of indexed data. ELISA heavily utilizes ZABBIX for user authentication and role based access control, notifications and self-monitoring. Elasticsearch Indices can be managed right in ZABBIX Frontend. ZABBIX "trapper" items and monitoring templates are used to centrally manage configuration of distributed environment of NXlog agents. Agents are capable to securely auto-register as ZABBIX "hosts".

Lukáš Malý

IT Consultant - Security and Monitoring at DATASYS s.r.o., Czech Republic

Conference video & presenations

11:00

Coffee Break

11:30

Lessons Learned While Being On-Site + Benefits of Zabbix Training

Oleg Ivanivskyi and Ingus Vilnis

Technical Support Engineers at Zabbix, Latvia

Oleg is working in the field of monitoring since 2009. He has experience with implementing, adjusting and developing Zabbix monitoring solutions since 2011. In 2013 Oleg Ivanivskyi joined Zabbix team.
Ingus holds a Professional Master's degree in Socio-technical Systems Modelling and is constantly broadening his knowledge, setting high standards for self and others.

Conference video & presenations

12:10

Monitoring More Than 6000 Devices in Zabbix

Ryan will describe a Skunkworks project executed by Kinetic IT at the Department of Education to deliver an autonomous infrastructure monitoring solution for over 6000 devices distributed across WA. The team were given opportunity to experiment with DevOps practices such as Scrum product development, Infrastructure As Code and Continuous Integration to determine where the value lay and which practices should be adopted at greater scale.

Ryan Armstrong

Senior Systems Engineer at Kinetic IT, Australia

Ryan is a senior engineer for an IT out-sourcing company based in Perth, Western Australia, currently posted on the Tools and Automation team for a government agency. He also contributes to an IoT start-up in London and spends much time working on a big deployment of Zabbix enterprise monitoring (4000+ servers) and a fledgling deployment of Puppet Enterprise.

Conference video & presenations

12:50

Lunch

13:50

Event Analysis Toolset

During outages on 10k+ hosts environment, NOC and Operations teams may face hundreds of alerts in order to perform root cause analysis, remediation or escalation, meanwhile logging resolution progress to Incident Management system for audit purposes. This presentation will describe RingCentral approach to Incident and Problem Management in large Zabbix monitored cloud. Co-authors of the presentation: Dmitry Shchemelinin, Ph.D., Sr. Director of Operations, RingCentral, USA

Furthermore, it was necessary to know the limits of the new architecture by having test loads and be sure that the new architecture will absorb load peaks

Konstantin Yakovlev

Production Support Engineer at RingCentral, Russian Federation

Konstantin is a DevOps engineer with a wide knowledge of cloud monitoring and event management. Working on Zabbix monitored UCaaS platform support for the last 2 years, Konstantin has gained a lot of experience as a network operator and his passion is to make people’s lives easier.

Conference video & presenations

14:30

Manage Zabbix Proxies in Remote Networks

Monitoring multiple server farms spread all around the world is not an easy task, many small problems have to be addressed, but using Zabbix it is all a breeze. We will talk about our experience on setup of Zabbix proxies in very remote networks, problems we encountered and how we worked on fixing them.

Dimitri Bellini and Pietro Antonacci

Quadrata, Italy

Dimitri Bellini has over 12 years of Unix experience within enterprise environment, having extensive knowledge of storage arrays and SANs. Dimitri is using Zabbix since 2005. Dimitri characterizes himself as Open Source solutions evangelist.

Conference video & presenations

14:50

Coffee Break

15:20

Zabbix at the University of Oslo

A case study showing the problems we have resolved with Zabbix and the challenges we had when we implemented Zabbix as the main monitoring tool at the University of Oslo. The number of challenges is not low in an organization as heterogenous as ours, with many thousands of servers and clients, all kinds of devices connected to our infrastructure, different operating systems, multiple locations and hundreds of IT staff. Full automation and delegation of privileges are the key words in the work we have done during the past year and a half.

Rafael Martinez Guerrero

Senior Engineer at , University of Oslo, Norway

Rafael specializes in database and performance tuning, database security, system integration, Linux server administration and monitoring with Zabbix. Rafael is currently working as a senior engineer for the Center for Information Technology at The University of Oslo and is the author of PgBackMan, a PostgreSQL backup manager released as an open source project.

Conference video & presenations

16:00

Lightning Talks

5-minute inspiration!

Share one great idea, tell a story, be creative and inspire - through a short 5-minute presentation.

Lightning Talk Speakers:

Conference video & presenations

16:40

Q&A Session with Zabbix Team

During this session all participants and attendees of Zabbix Conference 2016 are welcome to ask their questions to Zabbix team.

17:20

Closing Speech

Alexei Vladishev

Founder and CEO, Zabbix

Alexei is the author of Zabbix, an enterprise class open source monitoring solution, and also the founder of Zabbix LLC, the company developing Zabbix.