Sensu Summit 2019 talks

Sensu Summit 2019 featured talks from Harvard, Target, Gene Kim, PagerDuty, Corey Quinn, and more. We heard about the latest updates in Sensu Go, the challenges of multi-cloud monitoring, and stories from the Sensu Community. Watch the talks below.

Sensu Summit 2019 Recap

We had a blast at Sensu Summit 2019! Check out the highlights reel and recap on our blog. We can’t wait to see you next year!

Caleb Hailey: Sensu as a Multi-Cloud Monitoring Control Plane

In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey explores how Sensu provides a “monitoring control plane” that is analogous to the Kubernetes control plane, and how Sensu can empower organizations by delivering consistent monitoring workflows in multi-cloud environments.

Sean Porter: Scaling Sensu Go

For over eight years, the Sensu community has been using Sensu to monitor their applications and infrastructure at scale. Sensu Go became generally available at the beginning of this year, and was designed to be more portable, easier and faster to deploy, and most importantly: more scalable than ever before! In this talk, Sensu CTO Sean Porter will share Sensu Go scaling patterns, best practices, and case studies. He’ll also explain our design and architectural choices and talk about our plan to take things even further.

Tiffany Longworth: Measuring the Right Things

We’ve moved from waking someone up if a disk passed some arbitrary threshold to only paging off-hours when the business is impacted. Our lives have improved immensely because we learned how to measure the right things. In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, Zapproved SRE Tiffany Longworth takes some of the lessons we’ve learned from monitoring and alerting and shows how we can apply them to how we measure the humans in our systems. From who we see and don’t see as leaders to which candidates we think have the potential to be excellent contributors, let’s look at how we’ve been measuring humans and see if we are evaluating the right things.

Corey Quinn: The Myth of Multi-Cloud

This talk explores the practical reality of a “multi-cloud strategy,” with all of its warts. The financial, technical, and operational complexities introduced by multiple providers can take companies by surprise. In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, Cloud Economist Corey Quinn explores the basic truth of “however much you hate your cloud provider, you will hate arbitrating between them far more.”

Molly Duggan: Order from Chaos: Automating Monitoring Configuration

In a high-performance computing shop with over 3,000 nodes, Harvard FAS Research Computing can’t afford chaos around our monitoring checks! In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, you’ll hear from Harvard SRE Molly Duggan about how they’re using CI/CD pipelines and the Sensu Go API to ensure that all changes to their monitoring system are validated, reproducible, and version controlled.

Panel: The Mission-Critical Role of Monitoring in a Multi-Cloud Environment

Gene Kim, multiple award-winning CTO, researcher and author, chats with Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey and Sensu CTO Sean Porter about monitoring in a multi-cloud environment.

Jef Spaleta: Migrating to Sensu Go

Jef Spaleta, developer advocate at Sensu, gives a live demo on migrating from Sensu Classic to Sensu Go.

Ben Abrams: Building a Security Team Without Becoming “The Bad Guy”

Ben Abrams has had various developer roles in his career where security teams got in the way and got bad reputations as the NO team, and now he’s in the process of building his own security team. In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, he’ll discuss some tips on avoiding this and engineering seeing security as an asset rather than something to work around.

James Burns: Seniority By Chaos: The Changing Role of the Senior Engineer

Myth: Senior engineering is a journey from many mistakes to no mistakes.

Fact: Years do not make the senior engineer, experience does. Practicing chaos accelerates learning, providing “senior level” skills in months. So what is the new role of the senior engineer? In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, James Burns, Developer Advocate at Lightstep, discusses.

Adam Westman: Introducing GoAlert - An On-call Scheduling and Notification Open-source Product

Your tech runs 24/7, but you don’t. In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, Adam Westman, Sr. Engineering Manager at Target, shows off GoAlert, which allows engineers to get mobile notifications on critical alerts without having to constantly watch dashboards or work queues.

Killian McHale and Artur Malinowski: PPB’s Sensu Journey

In 2016 Paddy Power and Betfair, two gambling giants, merged to form PPB. Each company had its own monitoring baggage, but the SRE team was tasked with cleaning up and consolidating their toolsets. This Sensu Summit 2019 talk from Artur Malinowski and Killian McHale looks at their selection process, scoring and ultimately the decisions which led them to Sensu – which now monitors over 10,000 clients across the PPB estate.

Jef Spaleta: The Bonsai Asset Index: A new way for the community to share resources

Sensu launched Bonsai, the Sensu asset index pretty quietly in February, and since that time we’ve been doing continual improvements on the asset story with feedback from our early adopters. In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, Developer Advocate Jef Spaleta provides an overview of the asset feature journey, how assets work, the role Bonsai plays, and how the community is already contributing!

Lorne Kligerman: Monitoring Graceful Failure of a Distributed System

In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk, Lorne Kligerman, Director of Product at Gremlin, will cover failing gracefully as an engineering goal which can be confidently tested and monitored with Chaos Engineering. By purposely causing failure of one service at a time in a controlled environment, you can safely observe and react in a timely manner to limit the effect on the end user.

Julian Dunn: Best Practices for Modern Service Ownership

In this talk from Sensu Summit 2019, Julian Dunn, Sr. Manager of Product at PagerDuty, shares insights from how the most innovative companies on the Internet today combat these issues with service maturity modelling: how they define maturity, how they measure it both before and after a service change is introduced to a system, and how they map out the potential impact of component changes on the whole environment. This talk is also a clarion call for a new way of keeping track of all the “stuff” that we’re building, because our existing approaches like CMDBs and Wikis are inadequate for keeping up with the scale of what’s being built today.

Adam Frank: AIOps & Observability to Lead Your Digital Transformation

The day to day life of a DevOps & IT Ops engineer should be spent on developing the beautiful products and services you offer your customers and less time operating them. In this Sensu Summit 2019 talk from Moogsoft Sr. Product Manager Adam Frank, you’ll learn how Moogsoft & Sensu, along with other monitoring and observability tools, will drive your digital transformation, allowing you to understand the significance of your alerts and the alerts that are correlated, to give you better and faster context of an incident.

Garrett Honeycutt: Sensu + Puppet

In this Sensu Summit 2019 ecosystem session, Garrett Honeycutt, Principal at Tailored Automation, shares where we are with the Puppet module for managing Sensu and discusses the changes to the module and how users can migrate from Sensu Classic to Sensu Go. He also shows off all the testing surrounding the Puppet module and how they able to uncover issues and contribute back to the Sensu-go project during the GA release (and how that continues).

Lucy Wyman: Bolt by Puppet

Puppet software engineer Lucy Wyman demonstrates Bolt, an open-source orchestration tool.