August 2021 Community Bulletin

Announcements
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:newspaper: Updates

Poll: Discord server for Checkmk?

What do you think about having an instant messaging platform for the Checkmk community? The forum has been a great resource for asking and searching for questions. We think we can complement it by having an instant messaging platform that can facilitate not only knowledge-sharing, but also off-topic discussions via text and voice/video. There’s also a possibility to use it for our online events, e.g. community call, instead of using Zoom. The goal is not to eliminate the forum, rather, have another platform that can address its limitations.

But first, we want to know if you like this idea!

Should we have a Checkmk Community Discord server?

  • Yes, it’s a good idea!
  • No, I don’t like using Discord / the forum is enough
  • I don’t have any experience using Discord, but I am willing to try

0 voters

Feel free to reply to this post for any additional feedback that you have regarding the Checkmk Community Discord.

Community Call Recording

Missed the July Community Call? You can watch the recording on our YouTube channel. Watch the video

:mega: Shout-outs

:star: New User of the Month- July 2021

This badge is granted to congratulate two new users each month for their excellent overall contributions, as measured by how often their posts were liked, and by whom. Welcome to the Checkmk forum!

:star: Our 3333th Forum User

We have reached over 3.3k sign ups now on the forum, and @frakka is the lucky 3333th. Welcome to the Checkmk forum!

:trophy: New Community Helpers

Community members whose reply got marked as a solution for the first time. Welcome aboard!

:electric_plug: Published Packages on the Exchange

These are the people who have contributed packages to the Exchange (new + updated packages) published last month.

@r.sander:

@ttr: VMware vSAN

@bkuhn: Check of MySQL Status Variables with Instance Support

@jan-hendrikscholz: umbrellava

Nerothank: telegram_notify

:beetle: Bugfixes

Contributors whose PR got merged/included in the commit on the Checkmk GitHub repo last month. Also included are PRs that were not directly merged, but an action was taken by someone from tribe29 to apply the PR (e.g. creating internal tickets)

AKA-47: Added unit decision to inventory_allnet_ip_sensoric_humidity #387

@thl-cmk: fixes mem_used.py inventory plugin #386

@andreas-doehler: Bugfix for apt check - added some header lines to output with actual Ubuntu #384

dsrink: bugfix in local.py: min/max values are optional #382

Thanks everyone for your contributions!

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Regarding Discord:
I plainly dislike the solution. Not in a technical manner but more as a philosophy towards that kind of services. In my opinion Big Blue Button or Jitsi would be better alternatives, technically equal to Discord but at the same time advocating open source.
I know that from a business perspective you sometimes need to use services that cost a fee but do not put workload on your staff (see Slack, which you are already using). But I think it would be a technically equal solution which sends a strong message towards using open source software if you went ahead with one of the aforementioned solutions.
This is not a purely objective view, this is heavily influenced by my personal subjective opinion.

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BigBlueButton and Jitsi serve a very different purpose, as they are video conferencing solutions. Discord is mainly a chat solution.

Maybe the question should rather be: Do you want a synchronous communication system (=chat) besides the asynchronous forum.

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Yep, you got me there I guess, I was not quite sure to what extend the solutions offer chat capabilities.

But your point is very good: Maybe ask the question in general for now, before choosing a solution.

There are still XMPP-based solution and Nextcloud can be extended towards that use case too. :slight_smile:

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I like that this forum is publicly indexable/google-able, so any problems being discussed here will immediately be visible to anyone looking for solutions to their problems. That’s not true of Discord. Every problem solved in Discord is one NOT solved in the public eye. I was reading this forum to find solutions to my problems for over a year before I actually signed up. If the threads I was reading were hidden in a Discord, I would never have seen them in my Google results, and I probably would not have bothered getting onto Discord to try to find them. In fact I probably wouldn’t have bothered signing up if the forum wasn’t as active as it is, and Discord would detract from that.

So while Discord could be of benefit to “the community” (read: people who actively participate in forums), I worry that it would also be a detriment to the broader product ecosystem (all the people just using the Checkmk for monitoring their stuff). Maybe it would be appropriate for the more active in-depth in-crowd (like plugin devs etc).

I’m not opposed to Discord as a product for the job myself, my concerns would be the same for Slack or any other alternative.

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Rocketchat is another open source possibility, similar to slack and mattermost.

I have no affiliation with them but have been using the community edition for a few years. Rocketchat can be self hosted.
I think we also tried Element back when it was called Riot as well but cannot recall why we chose Rocketchat instead.

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