There was not much time for blog articles during the conference. Or after that. But from the on-site experience and feedback it seems that the very first Zabbix conference was just a bit short of amazing.
Talking about Zabbix
We had two days of Zabbix talks about various topics, including Zabbix in safety critical environments, scaling in huge enterprises, performance and API usage – and lots of others. In between the talks heated discussions took place about various practical topics. What we learned – breaks were not long enough, at least the first ones. Everybody seemed to be so very excited to meet others whom they could discuss secrets of monitoring with, that it was hard to get in the mood for another talk. Given the extreme variety of industries and environments that participants represented, it was indeed a unique chance to catch that person who implemented something you just started looking into.
It was amusing to see some speaker show how concerned they were with a specific problem with triggers going into UNKNOWN state – which in their environment was represented by blue icons – by saying “red and blue lights” (while intending to say “red and green”, of course). Or, after some discussion with our USA friends on how “nobody says from USA” the previous night, hear the European slant of the event with “I’d like to introduce our next speaker from the USA”…
Who was there
More than 100 people participated in the conference from many countries from as far as Brazil and Japan. The biggest amount of visitors was from Russia, while Estonia grabbed the second place. Third place was tied between Japan, Lithuania and The Netherlands.
…not just Zabbix
Of course, it wasn’t just strictly Zabbix that was being discussed. There was quite a lot of other activities, like several nights of various Riga specialties, including the welcoming Riga Old Town, beer and Riga Black Balsam (which seemed to earn a special place in hearts and clothes of some participants). You can see both official and less official events in the picture gallery. If you have your own stories about the Zabbix conference, feel free to share them in the comments here.
Oh, and if you have your own pictures of the event, send them over to the Zabbix conference e-mail (if you have more than a few, just let us know – we’re all technical people here, we surely can figure out better means to transmit images).
Have any other feedback? Post that in the conference forum thread.
Couldn’t attend?
For those who couldn’t attend or would like to refresh their memories most of the slides are available for download on the conference agenda page. While that won’t have most of the content that was given during the talk itself, it might at least give some indication of the topics covered during the conference.
See you next year
We also heard that many people could not come because they found out about the event too late – to prevent that from happening next year (we just have to have this event again…), we would like to start planning a bit sooner. To keep up with the news you can follow the usual community channels (forum, IRC channel), and you can also subscribe to the Zabbix newsletter – see left hand side on the Zabbix homepage.
Suggested dates for the next year event will be announced shortly – stay tuned. In the meanwhile we could promise to tell you next year in-person how one of the conference memes started.
…no Wi-Fi