Last week I was down in the Los Angeles area doing some work and I decided at the last second to attend SCALE 6X with some friends at the last second. I'm glad I did, since I had a great time, met some cool people and got a ton of new T-shirts.
We started out the day with a presentation on PostgreSQL 8.3 by Josh Berkus. Josh is a developer for Sun Microsystems and is a member of the core PostgreSQL team. He gave a great presentation on the features of the 8.3 release and really got me thinking about a system I maintain. There may be an upgrade project coming to this machine soon.
Next we wandered around the vendor hall for a bit. Mostly I collected T-Shirts and stickers, but things got really interesting when we stopped to chat with the people at the Zenoss, Hyperic and OpenNMS booths. We are looking at revamping our monitoring quite a bit at work, so this was a good chance to throw out questions. First we talked to the Zenoss guys. I've used Zenoss in the past and I like how much information it is able to pull from devices and servers. It's all done over SNMP, which has its own issues, so I don't have to install an agent on the target systems. It handles network equipment and Windows servers with the same ease. I can also use Nagios plugins to extend its capabilities. Really, its a nice app all around.
Things got really interesting at the OpenNMS booth though. I still don't know a ton about OpenNMS, but what caught my attention was how I could manage workflow with it. They have been working with Hyperic on integration to each other. One scenario that I liked was that a Hyperic check could cause an event in OpenNMS. Normal pager notifications, emails, etc go out. But to take it a step further, I can also define a handler in OpenNMS that when a specific event occurs the application automatically opens up a ticket in Jira for tracking and remediation! Now this I thought was cool. How many times have you had a repetitive issue with an application and struggled to communicate the impact of the issue to management. With this, I can track the work done to resolve each incident, the time taken and create a report for management to summarize the issue. Ok, it's boring, but still pretty cool. Who knows, with this kind of information maybe the root cause of the issue could get fixed.
Last we headed over to a presentation on Puppet by Luke Kanies of Reductive Labs. Puppet provides you with tools to keep your system configurations consistent and ease the difficulty of manually maintaining configurations and packages. It looks really cool and I'm going to play with it some. I still have a question about how secure the communications are between the clients and master server, but I heard something about client SSL certificates so maybe that will do the trick. Anyhow, some testing is definitely in order.
Other than that, not much else exciting at the show. I had a good time and got somethings to play with. If you're down in the LA area next year when SCALE 7X is, I'd recommend checking it out. For $70, it's hard to beat.
