OSMC 2012 - Open Source Monitoring Conference
Posted by Michael Medin at 2012-10-22

As always Netways arranged for the yearly Open Source Monitoring Conference in Nürenburg. As always I was suckered into coming.
I had originally planned not to come but alas since my planned vacation was postponed I decided on going. This is a short review of the sessions I attended and my impressions of the conference as a whole.
The Elevator
One massive problem with the venue for this conference is that there are
no stairs (ish) so you have to use on of the two elevators when you want
to visit your room. This means when you head down for breakfast it
usually takes 5-10 minutes as you have to wait for the overfull
elevator. To top that this year they had managed to break one of the
elevator. On the upside I managed to get some nice pictures of the
surprisingly large number of components which makes up an elevator
panel.
Andreas Ericsson: News in Nagios 4.0
Martin Gerhard Loschwitz: Monitoring with Pacemaker
Rihards Olups: Zabbix 2.0: Even Better
Lunch
Lunch was the usual choice of food as well as the
rather nice side dishes(?) in various forms. I was rather impressed with
the glass configuration where someone had taken the time to arranged
juice and water glasses in a triangle with juice and water every other
row.
Jens Michelsons: Monitoring by extending the Net-SNMP agent
After attending a few minutes of this where he explained how the MIB worked I feel naah, to basic for me and left seeking to chat a bit to the Icinga people about “the other project”.
Christophe Haen: Monitoring at CERN
Sounds reasonable I guess and I have been, with NSClient++, wanted for some time to create a standard solution.
Pierre Waellemacq: PMp - another approach to configure Nagios
Not really my cup of tea really. Was a Nagios add-on for harvesting information via SNMP and the like? Seemed to me a lot like NIDI apart from tighter integration with Nagios.
Evening event
Next up was the evening event where I met up with
the "old crew" from Tom-Tom as well with "The Zabbix" guy (I am bad with
names, ok?). And we had a blast as always. This year they had added some
entertainment in the form of light jugglers as well as what might have
been some German stand-up-comedy. No idea what they were on about since
I don't understand German at all.
The night ended early for me as I was scheduled the next day and had to be respectable J
From what I heard “the Zabbix” guy and Andreas Ericsson had a great time ;)
Jean Gabès: Shinken
Michael Medin: NSClient++
Since this is my blog I won’t really go into my presentation apart from saying I (as last year) had issues with the presenter and I think it is time to abandon Logitech for a new brand to see if someone else’s stuff is not utterly broken, seems that the Logitech can’t work when you have a wireless microphone in the vicinity of the presenter.
Christoph Mitasch: MySQL Monitoring & Management
Mike Adolphs: Monitoring Behavioral Driven infrastructures with Cucumber-Nagios
I guess I might have liked a bit more hands on and experiences and less theory but perhaps that is due to my dev background.
Dual German sessions and winning the twitter war!
For some odd reason each year there is one
dual-German session slot which means I tend to leave early so this was
the end of the actual conference for me. Instead I brought my bangs
over to my new hotel where I was to stay the last night and managed to
walk around Nuremberg a bit. Finally I managed to get a shot of me
(@mickem) winning the twitter war much thanks to Rune
Darrud who assisted me by
repeatedly tweating my name
After party
Finally we had the netways/Icinga after party which was nice this year as well. Albeit fortunately no one (I’m looking at you Pamela) kept feeding various strange drinks this year which meant I did in fact not have a massive hangover the next day.
The loot
Thanks to my review (Review: Open Source Monitoring
Conference
2011)
last year they managed to listen and offered some nice loot to all
attendees at the conference. This year the loot extended to a very nice
Zabbix pen as well as a mug (blatantly
copied from last years Nagios event) but at least this was more of a
thermos cup with a water tight seal which means I can actually use it to
carry milk and such for the baby
Thank you netways!
A big thank you to Netways for arranging a nice conference again. And see you all next year!
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