Announcing Sensu Summit 2019: themes and CFP

We’re excited to announce this year’s Sensu Summit, happening September 9-10, 2019 at Revolution Hall in Portland, OR. This will be our third-annual user conference, where we’ll bring together the monitoring and DevOps communities for two days of talks, workshops, knowledge sharing, and continued conversations at the ever-so-popular after party. Register today — the super early bird discount expires March 29, 2019.

This year’s event is happening the same week as the wonderful Portland DevOpsDays. If you haven’t been, check it out to enjoy two great conferences while visiting the lovely city of Portland! Additionally, we want diverse perspectives at Sensu Summit, and are willing to help out if you’re from an underrepresented group in tech and your employer won’t pay for your trip. To learn more about our diversity scholarship, please email us at community@sensu.io.

Missed Sensu Summit last year? Check out our recap, which highlights talks from Kelsey Hightower, stories of scale from Box.com and Industrial Light & Magic, plus our community unconference. To watch videos of the talks, take a look at our YouTube playlist. This year, we’re excited to feature talks from Sensu CTO Sean Porter on scaling Sensu Go, VP of Product Anna Plotkin on the product evolution of Sensu Go (plus a look at what’s to come), and CEO Caleb Hailey on Sensu as a multi-cloud monitoring control plane. Plus, we’ll have Tiffany Longworth, Site Reliability Engineer at Zapproved, on measuring the right things — applying lessons learned from monitoring and alerting to look at how we measure the humans in our systems.

We’re also pleased to launch our call for proposals (CFP) — send us your great ideas by April 14, 2019. In this post, I’ll share some themes and talk ideas as food for thought — if your topic isn’t covered here, feel free to submit all the same. Bonus: if your talk is accepted, we’ll comp your ticket to Sensu Summit, plus you’ll get exclusive, speakers-only swag.

Sensu Summit 2019: themes and CFP

This year, we’d like to hear from folks in the Sensu Community and beyond. Here are a few ideas to get the creative juices flowing (and encourage you to submit a talk!):

• Tell us your multi-cloud strategy. How is your organization adopting multi-cloud or cloud-native technologies? Are you all about microservices and Kubernetes (and if so, what’s your strategy for maintaining visibility over those many moving pieces)? We’d love to hear how you’re using Sensu and Prometheus together, or whether (and how) you’re monitoring the service mesh (see this blog post from WePay). Has the recently launched Sensu Go played a role in your multi-cloud strategy?
• Tell us how you’re automating. What processes and systems do you automate? How does automation help you manage operational work? Last year, CEO Caleb Hailey talked about workflow automation for monitoring — does monitoring play a role in your CI/CD pipeline?
• We want to hear your people stories. How do you cultivate, recruit, and retain SREs? What are the ethics and the impact of our systems on people? What steps do you take to ensure delightful developer and operator experiences (including, but not limited to, mitigating alert fatigue)? Does your organization advocate multi-disciplinary training across engineers, developers, tech leads, and managers? Last year, Paul Czarkowski took us through the evolution of DevOps — what does that term mean to you? Or, as suggested recently, has DevOps left ops behind?
• Is open source integral to your organization? According to Google Cloud’s 2018 State of DevOps report, “58% of respondents agreed that their team made extensive use of open source components, libraries, and platforms, with over 50% agreeing that their team planned to expand use of open source software.” We want to hear about the role open source plays in your company, how you contribute, and advice for new contributors.
• How are you maintaining visibility over edge networks? Are you tasked with monitoring IoT devices? (NCR, for example, uses Sense to maintain visibility over 80,000 restaurant POS systems.) How important are on-premises edge computing and/our cloud based services in your IoT observability strategy? Were there unique challenges in your IoT deployments that required you to adapt your existing monitoring strategy? What does your ideal IoT monitoring solution look like?
• Tell us about building and designing reliable systems architecture and the role of testing and resilience in your organization. Are you engineering resilience against complex systems failures and sentient attackers? Are you all about chaos engineering? Tell us your take on the role of machine learning in reliable, resilient systems — and how you measure the reliability of machine learning systems.

Your talk idea not on the list? No problem! We’d love to hear what you have in mind — remember to submit your talk by midnight on April 14, 2019. And if speaking isn’t your thing, we invite you to spread the word on our CFP by sharing this blog post and to join us at Sensu Summit to catch some great talks. We hope to see you there!