Monitoring with Opsview

S Wijntje Alan :

Alan Wijntje has been working in IT since 2000 when he started out as a simple technician doing local IT support for various companies. Figuring out why something broke (and then fixing it) soon became his specialty and he out grew this job within a couple of years, his employer was quick to recognize this and within days a new assignment was found working on the NOC for a major Dutch ISP. After settling in Alan quickly started to get to grips with the various monitoring systems and was soon making various improvements. His love for Linux was a great asset when he was granted more and more freedom to tinker with the various systems including Netcool OMNIbus and Nagios. After three years (and a company merger) Alan moved to another department that was solely responsible for all monitoring systems and he was put in charge of all Nagios based systems. Running a lot of separate Nagios systems was however a lot of work and soon plans where made to move to a more user friendly, flexible and scalable solution. Opsview was introduced as the replacement and the system was built in record time after which Alan spend most of his time writing new plugins, fixing plugins, thinking up new ways of tackling various monitoring requirements (like using Selenium for web based tests) and so on. After about three years being the Opsview administrator Alan again moved department to join one of the networking teams (his other passion) where he gets to play around with data center switches, virtual switches and firewalls. Although he technically no longer is an Opsview administrator he still loves to help out (sometimes a bit to much some would say), write plugins and even spends lots of time on the Opsview forum and the #opsview IRC channel helping others out. Alan has worked for the Dutch company QNH since he started in IT and over the years they have always been quick to recognize his interests and talents and have helped him develop these skills (even some he never knew he had!?).