With just a few days remaining until Zabbix Summit 2023, our series of speaker interviews draws to a close as we talk to Opensource ICT Solutions trainer and consultant Nathan Liefting about how he worked with Adan Mohamed of Boldyn Networks to monitor the London Underground with Zabbix.
Please tell us a bit about yourself and your work.
I’m a Zabbix trainer and consultant for Opensource ICT Solutions. You might also know me from the books Brian van Baekel and I wrote called “Zabbix IT Infrastructure Monitoring.”
How long have you been using Zabbix? What kind of daily Zabbix tasks are you involved in at your company?
My tasks are easy to explain – Zabbix, Zabbix, and some more Zabbix! Opensource ICT Solutions is one of the few companies that focus solely on Zabbix, so I get to work full time with the product, 40 hours a week. I build new environments, integrations, automations, and anything that you might need for your Zabbix environment.
Can you give us a sneak peek at what we can expect to hear during your Zabbix Summit speech?
Definitely! Adan from Boldyn Networks and I will be presenting you with a real use case for Zabbix monitoring. We’ll have a look at how Boldyn has brought broadband network connectivity to the London Underground tunnels and why it’s so important to monitor the equipment that makes that all possible. Of course, since this is THE Zabbix summit, we’ll also look at what the Zabbix setup looks like and share a pretty interesting use case for SNMP traps.
How and why did you come to the decision to use Zabbix as the monitoring solution for your use case?
Boldyn was looking for the best network monitoring solution for their project. Since we offer exactly that, we got to talking and we decided that our favorite open-source network monitoring tool was the way to go. Since then, we’ve been building amazing custom monitoring implementations together. The rest is history.
Can you mention some other noteworthy non-standard Zabbix monitoring use cases that you’ve worked on?
Definitely! Since I get to work on monitoring all day long, we’ve got a lot to choose from. I do most of my work in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and all those markets are super exciting. We’re monitoring infrastructure that keeps planes flying safely and makes sure power grids are up and running, and now we’re also helping to keep people connected to the internet even when they go underground. If you ask me, it doesn’t get a lot more exciting than that – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.