This year’s virtual Checkmk conference (15-16th June) will be different from the previous ones. Thus, we would like to include you in the decision making process around the agenda of the conference as much as possible.
What’s different this year?
The conference will have a free segment and a paid segment.
Paid from 09:00 - 15:30 (CET): Workshops and tech sessions
Free from 16:00 - 20:00 (CET): New and planned features sessions
Why?
The two sessions, which always were voted as most relevant, were the “Newest developments” and the “Checkmk roadmap” session. With the conference being virtual again, we can and want to make this accessible to as many people as possible. Thus this part will be for free and also at a time, which is convenient for both attendees in the European time zones as well as in the American time zones.
At the same time, many of you asked for longer tech sessions and workshops. These will take part in the morning and early afternoon (CET) and will be available for a fee.
A picture speaks more than thousand words: thus here is the preliminary agenda visualized:
Wanted: Workshops and tech session ideas
We have several ideas already around that, e.g. automation with the new REST-API, developing check plug-ins.
But we want to hear from you:
1. What kind of workshops would you like to attend? Please mention some topics. 2. What kind of tech sessions would you like to see? Please mention some topics. 3. Would you prefer two shorter teaser sessions (45min each) or one in-depth session (90min)? 4. Additionally: What would make a potential customer story session good?
Please share also with us your general feedback around this year’s conference plan. We are looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
Thanks, the preliminary agenda outline sounds promising.
Workshops
coding and plugin development
SAP monitoring (w.r.t. Pandora FMS?)
best practices for establishing more complex alarming routines / escalation (both within checkmk and externally using available integrations / alerting tools)
Tech Sessions
upgrading to checkmk 2.0 - best practices, recommendations, scenarios
event console deep dive - benefit and automation for the daily operating; additional benefit of monitoring using event-based next to status-based
distributed monitoring / MSE - best practices and concepts with focus on sites‘ architecture / landscape, frontend
crowdfunding - how to transparently share the process with tribe29 AND among other customers
checkmk and its integrations - benefits and value adding
how are workshops defined? With/without interaction by attendees? Should they also implement/configure something during a workshop or only follow the presentation?
How do tech talks differentiate exactly from workshops?
This makes it perhaps easier to make concrete suggestions.
Regards,
Simon
Workshops are limited in number of participants (e.g. 6-10), thus allow for a “learning atmosphere”, where people can try sth. out as well and ask many questions. A ideal topic is any coding and implementation workshop.
Tech Session is a session, where we go in-depth into a specific topic - typically with a presentation + demo. That’s why I initially thought about 90min. This allows to go into detail and enough time to ask questions around it. There is no limit on attending participants in these session.
When I for example think about End-2-End Monitoring.
If you would do a workshop, you would go in detail in how to implement End-2-End Monitoring with Robotmk + how to write tests and monitor these then. Participants could in the workshops follow your instruction and write own tests to monitor f.e. a website.
After the workshop, each participant should be able to set-up Robotmk and conduct E2E monitoring.
If you would do a tech session, then you would showcase E2E Monitoring with Robotmk with some theory and then some use case demonstrations. Participants would after the session understand the concepts and would be interested in trying it out themselves in a D-I-Y manner.
there are two topics that are important to me - one word of advice, i’m no hard core coder but more of the “management” representative. I can code but i enjoy working with a gui a bit more.
Check Development - IDE or best practices
There is one thing about check development that usually gives me the creeps - it’s the fact that i do have to jump from command line, to gui, to debugging all the time. This is made even more complicated by the fact that in an enterprise environment, access to the servers or appliances is not always easy.
If you want to help us “non-hard-core-coder” types of users it would be awesome if you could showcase how a user could code and verify checks and plugins with a python IDE like for example PyCharm. I’d love to have an “out of the box” environment that actually helps me to invent cool plugins up to a point where i deploy them to an actual CheckMK machine.
Right now, i’m unable to build such a thing myself as I’m not a “hard-core-developer”. My process is currently a constant trial and error on the command line which is… kind of… i don’t know… uncool
How to best reach my goals sessions.
CheckMK is very flexible, it contains a ton of useful things. Some things however are still not possible in the GUI. There are ways to do that, but they require very in-depth knowledge of the inner workings of check-mk and i suppose, some cool things, customers did will crash with 2.0.
Example: If my scenrario is as follows - how can i best reach my goal:
Target: I have 25000 SNMP devices with 20 Interface Services each. My users now ask: Hey - please show me a dashboard of only those interfaces with errors on them AND, just show me the error metrics grpahically.
You know there are ways to do this but maybe the ways you know are better than the ones i come up with. It would be awesome if you could showcase “new” approaches to scenarios like these. (Classic admins would script mk file creations to get a lot of custom graphs but not every new user will be able to to this from scratch…)
This is important for both admins and operators alike but maybe most important for people like me who sit in between the customers, operators and admins
Oh - and a third hint:
Try to add extra paid tech sessions on a third and fourth day if your overseas customers want it. No admin from the us likes to stand up during night-times…
Hi Martin,
interesting concept - bit of a long day, but I think it can work.
Regarding workshops, arent the workshops from last year partly still relevant?
i.e. Performance tuning and the cmc, which I think Andi Boesl would have held?
For sure Robotmk(which I think has not been documented or I have not understood it completely but it has a lot of potential) and then the new amazing UI. I would be interested in the automatic provisioning of all the objects like hosts,discovery,service checks,rules etc. via configuration management tools like Terraform,Ansible etc.
Thanks for all your feedback. I will post later a poll for the workshops to get the final feedback from you.
Some specific comments.
Regarding workshops, arent the workshops from last year partly still relevant?
i.e. Performance tuning and the cmc, which I think Andi Boesl would have held?
All of the ones planned back then will be in some way be available, but performance tuning. Performance tuning is the most complex and advanced workshop, which we can only do in a physical setting, not a virtual one.
And info on how we can develop puling for AWS in cmk.
I guess you mean agents to push data? This is on the roadmap for 2.1 with host registration (please check our roadmap section on the website). There are methods how to push data already, but we prefer to build a stable mechanism rather than do a workshop.
SAP monitoring (w.r.t. Pandora FMS?)
That would be a great idea, but that would have to be done by an expert user - we can’t deliver a great talk on it. We have many users doing SAP monitoring and the ones who does this in large scale and depoth are unfortunately not allowed to talk about it. If there is anyone out there, who can actually talk about it, please send me a PM.
I don’t have sign-off on the packages and pricing yet, so can’t promise this will be final. But many have been asking, so here is a heads-up:
There are 4 packages:
Free: presentations in the afternoon
Basic for 99€: tech sessions + basic swag-pack + presentations
Standard for 499€: 1 workshop + tech sessions + standard swag-pack + presentations
Hi @martin.hirschvogel Hi,
does swag-pack mean something like giveaway? Like the Tshirts for example?
And why is the price gap from one workshop to two workshops so big?
Yes, swag pack is a nice pack with gifts.
There are some planning aspects involved in the workshop packages. Thus we will probably start offering the Premium pack first (like the 2-day ticket at festivals) and then fill the other workshops with the Standard package (like a 1-day ticket at a festival, where they offer them based on availability). Then we can adjust the workshops as well (e.g. offer more of x vs y). So, the Premium package gives you better access to the workshops and helps us planning. Hope that makes sense.
EDIT: Now I get the point. I actually miscalculated the price for the Standard package and set it too low. It will be 499€ instead of 399€. @CFriedrich
