Announcing Kelsey Hightower at Sensu Summit

We’re super excited to announce that open source advocate (and all-around rockstar) Kelsey Hightower will be speaking at Sensu Summit 2018! In a fireside chat with Sensu co-founders Caleb Hailey and Sean Porter, Kelsey will discuss industry trends in application and infrastructure delivery (hi 👋 Kubernetes and serverless), and take a look at the tradeoffs between operational complexity and operational abilities (i.e., monitoring).

If you haven’t already, you can snag tickets here (get them by July 31 and you’ll save with our early bird discount). We’ll post an in-depth schedule with full speakers and talk topics in the coming weeks, but for now here are a few logistics to start planning your trip.

Announcing our pre-conference advisory boards

As a product company, user feedback is critical to our success; the more we know, the more we can improve our core product and services, and create better experiences for our users. The challenge is, as an open source company, we don’t know who all of our users are, so this year we’re opening up an invitation for folks who engage directly with the Sensu Engineering and Leadership teams to join us for either our Technical or Customer Advisory Board (TAB and CAB for short), happening August 21 (one day before Sensu Summit kicks off).

Advisory board meetings give us an opportunity to meet with expert users and customers to learn what is or isn’t working for them, and how we can improve Sensu. If your company is running Sensu in a production environment at medium to large scale (i.e., hundreds or thousands of systems), we want to hear from you! Send us an email at events@sensu.io if you’re interested in participating. If you end up joining us for either the CAB or TAB, we’ll comp your ticket to the Sensu Summit, hook you up with exclusive swag, plus you’ll get the opportunity to meet with the Sensu Leadership and Engineering teams (and get all the bragging rights of a product influencer).

Travel dates

Unless you’re joining us for our CAB or TAB (see above), we recommend arriving on August 21. This will give you plenty of time to settle in before the event kicks off on August 22. We’ll wrap up with a community un-conference day on August 23 to hack through all the things we’ve learned.

Here’s the schedule at a glance:

• August 21: Pre-Conference Advisory Boards. (Details above.)
• August 22: Sensu Summit. Look forward to a full day of presentations featuring Sensu user stories, workflows, and technical deep dives from the Sensu engineering team. We’ll close out the day with continued conversations, cocktails, and snacks at the Portland Art Museum’s Sculpture Gallery.
• August 23: Community Unconference. Get together with experts in the community, including lightning talks, hands-on labs, and open hacking time.

Where to stay

The event will be held at the Portland Art Museum in downtown Portland, Oregon. There are several great hotels in the area; we recommend The Porter Portland Hotel, Hotel Modera, Paramount Hotel, and The Sentinel Hotel.

Use these codes to get a discount:

• The Porter Portland Hotel: 1366505
• Hotel Modera: (click the link to get your discounted rate)

Keeping it local

There are loads of fun things to do in Portland in the summer. Here’s a short list of our favorites:

• Walk or bike along the waterfront.
• Visit one of the many award-winning breweries in town.
• Visit OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry).
• Take a jetboat ride or cruise on the Willamette River.
• Relax in one of our many beautiful parks.
• Grab dinner or a drink at one of our beloved restaurants. Like we said, that’s just the short list. Check out more fun things to do here.

Full speaker list coming soon

The CFP is now closed — thanks to everyone who submitted! We’ll be in touch shortly with our selections, and you can look forward to this year’s speaker list in mid-July. For now, we’re excited to have the aforementioned Kelsey Hightower speaking, plus talks from Workday Principal Software Engineer David Beaurpere, release engineer veteran J. Paul Reed, Box Senior Infrastructure SRE Trent Baker, and the engineers building Sensu.

Sponsorship opportunities

A special thank you to Grafana and InfluxDB for sponsoring our event! Becoming a sponsor is a great opportunity to connect with ~200 Sensu users who are eager to learn and study up on best practices, stand out among the growing Sensu community, and share the #monitoringlove. Interested in learning more? Check out our prospectus, and feel free to send us an email at events@sensu.io with any questions.

We’re so excited to spend time with you and are looking forward to another great event. See you in Portland!