Day job: I work at BTC IT Services GmbH (BITS) and specialize in all things to do with monitoring and Nagios there. Day-to-day, I manage two large Nagios platforms, which are built for redundancy and high availability. The larger of the two currently monitors round about 1700 hosts with approx 14,000 service checks.
What are your areas of specialty in the Icinga team?
I contribute to Icinga in API and web interface development, unfortunately juggling work and uni at the moment has limited me immensely in how much I can do.
What do you enjoy about working on the project?
I like the whole team and what glues us together. It’s so much fun to work with a bunch of crazies, who simply want to do something meaningful with their free time 🙂
What was one big challenge or memorable moment while on the Icinga team?
Well, it was no easy decision to fork. I can still remember sitting together brainstorming names and asking ourselves a few times over if we really wanted to do it. The decisive moment was when we announced the fork; then I had 1000 questions buzzing through my head. Was what we were doing really right? How will the press, community, developers, etc. react? Today I look back and think the decision was 100% right!
Outside of Icinga, what are some of your other pet projects?
Beside Icinga I maintain the Nagios/Icinga Portal and work mostly on the NagTrap addon, but every now and again on NagVis too. Last year I took over the technical editing of “Nagios- Das Praxisbuch” by Gerhard Lausser and on top of that I have been running my own charity project “The Open Source Community Helps!”. Here I collect donations which go 100% direct to help needy children in Germany. At the moment the money is going to support a pediatric clinic in Wilhelmshaven.
What would you bet to be the next big thing in the open source or IT world?
Hmmm, that’s hard to say. I think that Linux’s presence as an operating system will grow in the future, or perhaps in other words – I hope so 😉 Otherwise I reckon cloud computing will be the next wave to hit us as everything becomes more and more networked.
How do you like to spend your time away from the keyboard and monitor?
Beside work, I am studying Business Systems at uni, which takes up a lot of my spare time. But otherwise I like to read a good book, go to the gym and more lately, try my hand at photography.
What’s your two cents on Icinga?
1) If we talk about enterprise monitoring, then I think it is not enough to just support MySQL and PostgreSQL in the NDOUtils/IDOUtils, rather large databases such as Oracle should be too. Many large companies rely on Oracle and have it active in use. In my opinion, Icinga made a significant step forward here.
2) Through the new API and web interface, Icinga will offer far more freedom to develop. Just the API alone, makes life a lot easier 🙂
Overall I hope that more and more people try Icinga out and see for themselves, the potential that is still waiting to be tapped!
