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 absolute 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 had the same meaning. 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 out of a couple of crazy guys who know Checkmk (on a technical site) better than all others (or are on the best way to this point). Everyone is working very hard. I think the superpower of this team is that everyone is helping everyone else out at any point. No matter who asks a question, he gets answers.

What does a typical work day look like for you?

It depends on if I'm on Ticketdienst or on Consulting. Ticketdienst 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 an 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 people are doing a very great job and get all relevant topics the customer wants to get informed of. 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 get a good knowledge of all of them so I can explain it in an understandable way.

What is most important to you in your work life?

The most important thing for me is that I'm free to decide when I want to do which stuff. The freedom to handle my time on my own. No matter if it is 6 in the morning or 10PM.
I also love to play around with new software and try to get some knowledge about it. And that's also possible in times when no customer is asking for some help.