Last Thursday we’ve started to publish our series of pre-conference interviews with honored speakers of Zabbix Conference 2014. The conference will take place on September 12-13th, so for those who have already registered, you might find it interesting to read more about conference speakers and find out what new information and values are waiting for you at the upcoming event.
For those, who are still about to register for the event, we encourage you to get acquainted with our speakers and to find out about their scheduled presentations and decide on why you really should join Zabbix Conference this year.
Pre-conference Interview with Marek Neumann
Marek Neumann is a System Architect, Director Strategy & Architecture at freenet digital GmbH. The mission of the Strategy & Architecture is to develop, document and distribute a technological strategy, which supports and aligns with business. Based on this strategy the department has to prescribe the overall platform architecture, define applicable standards supporting the software development process, support the provision of an appropriate development and deployment infrastructure and eventually offer architectural blueprints. Marek Neumann has built up the initial Zabbix infrastructure 6 years ago.
During Zabbix Conference 2014, Marek Neumann will present his talk, called “Monitoring Enterprise SAN”. See Agenda page for details.
How did you / your company discovered Zabbix?
M.N.: We discovered Zabbix 6 years ago when we were looking for a scalable application, monitoring solution for our Enterprise Java platform. After tool evaluation, Zabbix turned out to be the most appropriate solution for our requirements.
Why did you choose Zabbix and what made it to stand out from other available monitoring software?
M.N.: The most obvious difference was the frontend which made it easy to configure the monitoring system, without a deep knowledge of the platform internals. Moreover Zabbix with its C-based core was relatively light-weight compared to other more sophisticated solutions. And last, but not least, there was professional support for an open source product, which also influenced our choice.
What was the key motivation for you to become one of our speakers at Zabbix Conference 2014?
M.N.: I remembered my talk I held two years ago. I liked the conference atmosphere and the fun-stuff around it. Everything was perfectly organized and I collected a lot of new inspirations how to improve our work with Zabbix.
Zabbix Conference takes place for the 4th year. What do you want attendees to learn from your session?
M.N.: My intention is simply to share our experiences we made with Zabbix over the years. I hope the attendees will get an idea how Zabbix can be used in a (probably) non-standard environment.
What is the key message that you will bring to the conference audience by your presentation?
M.N.: Automate as much as possible to reduce error-proneness and maintenance efforts.
This year’s Conference has a strong emphasis on scaling and high performance monitoring. What are your thoughts on the selected key topic?
M.N.: From my point of view Zabbix is already a very scalable solution. I hope to see a lot of examples for this thesis at the conference.
What do you look forward to at this year’s Zabbix Conference? What topics / issues you are more likely to discuss outside your session?
M.N.: My main interest is to see how other companies configure their Zabbix infrastructure especially when it comes to many hosts and items changing frequently in a dynamic environment.
For those, who are still not registered for the upcoming Zabbix Conference, please share your thoughts and reasons why they should join it?
M.N.: The conference is a very nice event, not as overcrowded as other tech conferences, in a very nice city with nice people sharing their experiences on a nice product.
Zabbix Team appreciates time and contribution of Marek Neumann and for his honest vision and opinion about Zabbix and the upcoming Zabbix Conference 2014.
This Wednesday, on 30 July, you will find out what Patrik Uytterhoeven, representative of one of Zabbix Partners in Belgium – Open-Future B.V.B.A., has told us about what you should expect at the Zabbix 4th annual conference.