2026-02-02, 17:15–17:40, B.1.0.29
Over the last year I've been working on migrating Fedora's aging Nagios & Collectd stack to Zabbix, using Ansible to deliver the full Zabbix config - no UI-side config needed.
In this talk, we'll explore:
- Why we moved to Zabbix over other tools
- The perils of a separate monitoring role, and how to instead put your application monitoring in your application roles
- The tech debt of figuring out how & why checks exist in your old stack... is "this one" even needed any more?
- The people side of tech debt work - practicalities for helping the people around you to get on board when "the current thing still works, doesn't it?"
It's been an interesting journey getting this project over the line, and while there might not be any shiny new technologies to come from it, I think there are lessons worth sharing. We all have tech debt, after all.
Greg Sutcliffe has been participating in open source communities for almost two decades, and is currently a Senior Sysadmin for Fedora. Before that, he was Community Architect and Data Scientist for Ansible, and Community Architect for Foreman.
In addition to the technical side of communities, he's also interested in the structure of communities, how people interact, and how communities achieve their aims. He's also interested in community data, and how we can use that to understand communities through a different view. He also wishes people wouldn't take averages of things they shouldn't.
He also plays far more automation games than he should.