Continuing our agenda themed articles, in this blog post we present you CEO of Cool Monitoring, Alain Ganuchaud, who will be sharing insights on Trouble Ticket Integration with Zabbix in Large Environment, with his speech at Zabbix Conference 2016.
There are only 6 days left to become a part of this year’s event. Visit our conference page to satisfy your curiosity and join today, to find all the reasons why participating will be beneficial for you and your company.
Pre-conference Interview with Alain Ganuchaud
Tell us about you and your company, how did you get started, and what choices led you to where you are now?
I come from Hewlett-Packard Company, developing around HP OpenView, especially in the area of databases. Then I established two OpenSources companies providing consulting for major accounts.
Since 2009 I have focused on Monitoring, mainly with Zabbix and I provide Zabbix consultancy for Banking/Insurance sectors and other large environment companies. Now I design SaaS Monitoring Platforms, that’s the strategy of CoolMonitoring that gathers many tools around Zabbix like Trouble Ticket, Dashboard like Grafana (we sponsored the development of Zabbix plugin), and many others.
What are your biggest challenges, and could you give us some interesting statistics regarding your work?
On the last Zabbix architecture project, I had to design, the scale of the monitored infrastructure was very impressive! Over 500 000 servers!
How did you choose Zabbix to be your monitoring solution, and what about Zabbix impresses you the most?
I realized early (around 2007) that Zabbix was the Monitoring Opensource Solution I was looking for, and because of its architecture, streamlined workflow and integrated features we still recommend Zabbix as the best monitoring solution to our customers.
What is your history with Zabbix Conference, and could you tell us your motivation for becoming one of the speakers for this year’s event?
By opportunity, I manage a large Zabbix environment (some over 15 000 servers) for my customers and I thought it was a good idea to share this knowledge with the Zabbix community. This is the common theme of most of my speeches at the conferences I attend, first with the infrastructure (Large environment Architecture with top hypervisors, tools, devs, etc.), then with Reporting those Large Environments (in such huge environment you need to be very precise and consistent).
For this year’s conference, I will try to elaborate and explain the thought process behind Zabbix automation with TroubleTicket using two ways connection. I have done a lot of developments for my customers based on this feature. For Zabbix Conference 2016, I will present a case study for a company named SwissLife, featuring Zabbix – ServiceNow integration, and for the next year, the plan is to cover Zabbix and Big Data Technologies!
What would be the key message of your presentation, and what do you want attendees to learn from your talk?
The key message of my conference is : Yes, it is possible to automate Zabbix – TroubleTicket in large environment.
I always try to push the boundaries and understand the limits of the product, because my customers (and more precisely the infrastructure of my customers) have demanding specifications and often exceed the thought of restrictions, proving that nothing is impossible with Zabbix.
In your opinion, what are the main advantages and reasons for joining the upcoming Zabbix Conference 2016?
My main reason is that, I want to share this knowledge and am happy to use this opportunity to thank SwissLife who gave me the authorization to release the solution I implemented under OpenSource licence and sponsored the project. On the Zabbix Share I also maintain a Database Monitoring Solution that is able to monitor ORACLE, MSSQL, MYSQL, SYBASE, DB2 & POSTGRES engines.
What topics you look forward to discussing with Zabbix community, conference participants and Zabbix team?
Zabbix and the community have made great progress but still have to work on many improvements for future releases.
In my opinion, the top 3 areas to improve on are: front-end (more precisely Dashboard, we sponsored the development of Grafana Zabbix plugin because the current front-end lacks certain features, if to be implemented in Large environments), Big Data ( it is time to make this a priority, because technology is evolving very fast and the solutions for this aspect are now available) and Distributed Architecture (as you know it was obsoleted with 2.4 release).
Those areas are the main topics I look forward to discussing with the Zabbix team and the community.
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At the conference Alain will talk about bridging Zabbix with over 5000 servers and ticketing system, covering steps on integrating Zabbix with Trouble Ticket HelpDesk, the architecture and what are the issues specially in Large Environments.
We are excited to meet Alain at the Zabbix Conference in a month, to gain and share new information, priceless best practices and experience.
Only one week is left to register, so we encourage you to act now and join the biggest Zabbix event of the year, to discover new possibilities of Zabbix, find answers, get to know Zabbix experts and community, people who share your passion, and quite possibly might become your next business partners!
