Nicolas Vongeheur

Hi Nico, thanks for taking the time! After working with Checkmk for more than 10 years you switched sites and became part of Checkmk in January 2023.

Why did you decide to work at Checkmk? What appealed to you about our company and our mission?

I have been using Checkmk for way more than 10 years. After realizing that the first thing I was doing, when joining a new company, was to upgrade their monitoring to Checkmk, it was an absolutely clear decision that I had to work here.

What do you think makes Checkmk or your team in particular special?

In my opinion, Checkmk is by far the best monitoring solution on the market. Even some customers I asked felt the same way. It is very performant, the rule-based configuration makes the administration so damn easy and there are no interpretation issues for the states of the services.

My team is made up of a couple of crazy guys who know Checkmk (on a technical side) better than anyone else (or are well on their way to that point). Everyone is working very hard. I think the super power of this team is that everyone is helping everyone else out at any point. No matter who asks a question, they get an answer.

What does a typical work day look like for you?

It depends on whether I’m on ticket service or in consulting. Ticketservice means that I first try to get an overview of the open Jira tickets and then find solutions for the customers' problems. This could be that I already know the answer to their problem and try to figure out if my assumption is correct or I try to get all relevant data from the customer and create a reproduction environment which is close enough to the customer's to debug it. If nothing helps, I try to get a direct call with the customer.

But the world is better on consulting days. Mostly, our sales team does a great job gathering all relevant topics the customer wants to be informed about. Then a first call of maybe an hour takes place to get a first view of what the customer’s environment looks like. To get prepared for the consulting itself, I write down all topics and try to gain a good understanding of all of them so I can explain everything in an understandable way.

What is most important to you in your work life?

For me, one of the most important things is that I have direct contact with our customers. I love to talk about Checkmk and its features and during Consulting, I am in my element. Furthermore, we have the opportunity to play around with other pieces of software and see how they can be integrated or monitored by Checkmk.