Frank Klaassen is a Senior DevOps Engineer with a broad range of experience and interests. Monitoring plays an integral part in his career – he has been working with Zabbix since 2008 and either introduced or improved the usage of Zabbix at all companies he has worked for. At Zabbix Conference Benelux 2020 Frank will talk about the discovery functionality of Zabbix to make configuration of environments easier and less time-consuming.
Please introduce yourself and tell a few words about your professional journey.
My interest in computers & technology started at a very young age. During my free time, I’ve taught myself a lot of different things, where Linux has really caught my interest. The most logical step for me would be doing my studies in IT, which I did.
After finishing my studies I was hired at an email security company, later on, moved to an energy company and finally my current employer which develops high-quality software for the internet where I have been for 6+ years already.
I’m a big fan of opensource solutions and I’m a contributor to various projects, including Zabbix.
During my free time, I’m still involved with a lot of IT-related things, where home automation is my current favorite.
How did you choose Zabbix to be your monitoring solution of choice?
I got to know Zabbix during my studies. A group of students provided IT-services to their peers and were using Zabbix 1.8. I had the opportunity to learn a lot about their setup and about Zabbix itself. I have seen and worked with other monitoring solutions as well but Zabbix always felt more polished, more complete and easily expandable to me.
I started using for my personal projects as well and either introduced Zabbix or expanded upon it at all of the companies I have worked for.
What would be the key message of your presentation, and what do you want attendees to learn from your talk?
In the years I have learned a lot about Zabbix. How to do things, but also how not to do things.
I’m a believer in automating as much as possible, in order to save a lot of time and to ensure everything is being monitored properly.
With my talk, I hope to inspire others to look into Low-Level Discovery and start using it themselves and make their life’s easier.
Are there any Zabbix-related topics you are looking forward to learn during the conference or your future practice?
Even though I’ve been using Zabbix for a long time already, at the conference last year I’ve learned a lot of new things which I used to improve our own monitoring setup. From the looks of it, this will also be the case this year.
I am mostly looking forward to the Zabbix 5.0 talk since it contains a lot of new functionality I’m interested in implementing and would love to hear more about.
Zabbix Conference Benelux 2020 will take place on March 6-7 in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
