Open Source Monitoring Is Not Enough Relevant for French Open Source Events ?

Oct 12, 2015

5 mins read

I’ve been to Portland for Monitorama this year and it was really interesting. Do you believe that, an entire event only for Monitoring, that’s awesome ! The conferences were very interesting and the level of the talks was also good.

Few weeks after this trip I was always thinking about this experience. Obviously I came back in France with much ideas. But not only that, I asked myself why there is not a lot of talks, conferences regarding monitoring in France.

Indeed we have plenty of open source events but what’s the place of open source monitoring in those events ?

That’s a good question dude !

Not enough speakers or talks ?


I know many people from french open source monitoring community who are used to answer to the call for participation.

So I guess the issue is not there. I think we have some good speaker in France even in Monitoring.

Talks are not relevant ?


Maybe the quality of talks are not enough relevant for those kind of events ? Ok maybe once but all the time ?? I can’t believe that, do you ?

Talks are product oriented ?


I had this kind of feedback few years ago. Well I think that was fair enough. Some friend of mine had the same feedback.

But when you see some talks regarding Docker, OpenStack, …

Those talks are product oriented, right ?

We all know the feedback “product oriented” was bullshit !! I’m really disappointed to see some people who give those kind of feedback and they can’t respect their “rules”.

We are not in the same “club” ?!

Where is the problem then ?


Well I guess the organizers of French events are not interested by monitoring. I don’t blame the events organizer because I know they need to have a lot of people and so on.

Monitoring is maybe less attractive than the other subjects.

Monitoring is often in “Devops” (buzzword) or “Sysadmin” tracks. And you could have plenty of subjects also in those tracks. How to deal with that case ?

Maybe organizers prefer talks about Cloud, Devops, Containers, Virtualization and stuff like that(other buzzwords). I’m pretty sure than less than 50% of projects/software in those topics are not in production.

Maybe that’s why there is no place for monitoring ! Maybe in their magic (or bullshit) topics, the monitoring is included by a brand new thing which is also magic.

Ok ok I’m done with trolls. (chuckles) Maybe not ;-)

In the real world !


In the “real world” when something goes wrong, people ask if the monitoring system detects the issue. So that means monitoring is very important for developers, ops, manager, …

Well that means monitoring is also important and even more important than standard services. You’re okay with that?

We’re talking about real things here and not about bullshit.

Come on ! We’re talking about production here !! I see the cloud everywhere !! please stop it !!

Enough is enough !!

I’ve got a point here isn’t ?

My feedback


During my trip in Portland I saw the difference between US and Europe regarding monitoring. US folks are thinking different and I found that very interesting. They have so many ways to monitor I was very happy to be there and to exchange with some of them.

I think some people in Europe and of course in France do the same but it’s a bit sad if they can’t share their experience of this subject during events.

This could push people to think that we are not good in this subject, I’m pretty sure that’s wrong, we have a lot of talented people in France !

Few weeks before my trip in Portland I made a talk at the first edition of Paris monitoring meetup and people were happy because “I think different”. I was very happy to share some information.

Few weeks after this trip, my company hosted the Paris monitoring meetup, a colleague made a talk regarding anomaly detection, a lot of people were interested. People were very happy to be there and to see there are some people who make different monitoring and they do interesting things like anomaly detection and prediction.

I think there are such good things regarding monitoring in France but unfortunately we don’t have a spot in big open source events. That’s very sad because monitoring is very important for each people.

We don’t have those issues with meetups. I guess it’s a positive thing.

The solution ?


Make a talk with a lot of buzzwords like devops, cloud, containers, micro services ?

Hell no ! Stop that bullshit !

Make talks in events in other countries because we can’t do it in France ?

I’m sure than all of you will not agree with me. It’s not so easy to make a talk in another country. It could be expensive if you don’t have a sponsor, you need to speak english or other language, …

The solution is not a solution and not even a workaround, it’s a kind of new path.

Why not create a kind of comitee to maintain a monitoring track during the big or small events ?

I think we should talk together and find a solution to allow us to have at least one or two talks regarding monitoring in France during some big events ?

It’s an open question, I’m available to discuss about that. I didn’t make this article to say open source events sucks in France but just for reconsider the place of monitoring in those events.

Few weeks ago I had this discussion with Olivier Jan. I think than Olivier have a pretty good idea on this subject.

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