Christoph Haas is a system administrator and web application developer with 17 years of experience in this field. He received a diploma in Computer Science and is currently leading the IT department of a software company in Hamburg, Germany. In his spare time he contributes to the open source community as a Debian developer or by working on websites like http://screenshots.debian.net/ that he is currently refactoring in Ruby on Rails. Some of the most noticeable contributions are the mail server tutorials he maintains on his website http://workaround.org/.

One of the most important aspects of system administration is monitoring the IT infrastructure properly. Christoph has been setting up monitoring systems all the way back to when Nagios was still called Netsaint. He even dedicated his diploma thesis to monitoring. In 2009 he replaced his last Nagios-based monitoring system and started using Zabbix in production for the large server environment running the http://pokerstrategy.com/ website. He got certified for Zabbix in large environments in 2011 and has since co-maintained the Zabbix package in the Debian distribution.

I am really excited to work with Zabbix. So, a big thanks goes to Zabbix SA – the company behind the software – for providing such a great open source monitoring solution. Although it still has a few rough edges it is far superior to almost any other monitoring software in my opinion, so I wish more system administrators knew about it.

This screencast series was mainly created using Kazam, Audacity, Kdenlive, FFmpeg, and Zim.I wanted to create the videos exclusively using open source tools on Ubuntu which worked really well, so thanks to the respective authors of this software. I would also like to thank my wife and kids for their patience when I was spending endless evenings in my basement office to create this series. And an extra thanks goes to Dmitry Smirnov who co-maintains the Zabbix package in Debian with me and who I left alone with the work due to lack of time.