Report from the Checkmk Conference #5

Monitoring dynamic environments and cloud services, setting up a secure Checkmk environment for better sleep, the roadmap for the upcoming version 1.6, and, of course, a lot of fun – that was the fifth Checkmk conference.

Around 300 participants and 30 Checkmk team members met up in Munich from 28 to 30 April. The annual Checkmk conference is like a family meeting and business event at the same time, and so the first evening started with dinner for all and lively discussions at every table. Monitoring fans and #monitoringlove everywhere – and later that night, we even had a spontaneous jam session with guitar and fiddle.

Bright and early the next morning, Mathias Kettner and Jan Justus started with their keynote and a lot of news: We have a new logo, new corporate colors, a new name (tribe29) and a bunch of new team members. "Wow, your group gets larger every year", one participant said to me during one of the coffee breaks, pointing at the mint green T-shirts of the Checkmk employees.

The software itself also changed a lot over the past few months. Checkmk 1.6 is about to be released, and the developers put in a lot of work to modernize the look & feel and increase the flexibility.

Much to learn

What a nice program the organizers had put together! Talks about the new features, how to monitor Docker and Kubernetes, automation in monitoring, and of course, the new Windows agent. All presentations were in German, with simultaneous translations for our international guests.

If you missed a talk or even the whole conference, visit our YouTube channel. Navigate to playlists to watch the German and the English versions of the presentations. Also, we published the slides on the conference website.

For the first time, there was a separate workshop track. Our consultant Alexander Wilms talked about "best practises for Checkmk". He explained naming concepts, host tags, rules, and more – light and easy, with a lot of real-life examples. Even though this workshop was aimed at Checkmk newbies, there were some eye-openers for advanced users.

See You next Year!

Needless to say, there was plenty of time to chat and do fun things, for example the conference dinner and the following party. Pretty tired, but with a lot of new ideas and some pretty cool Checkmk tricks, I got on the train to Cologne ... dreaming of #monitoringlove in mint.