CANCOMers at Zabbix Summit

CANCOM Slovakia: Rišo can you tell us what Zabbix is?

Zabbix is a relatively small Latvian company. It has about 150 employees and its office is about as big as ours. Their main business is developing a monitoring application, which we at CANCOM also use to monitor customer systems. We currently manage approximately 23,000 devices from different customers and by the end of next year we will probably reach 35 000 using this application.

CANCOM Slovakia: This month the Zabbix Summit took place in Riga. How did the invitation to such a conference have reached you?

We, as CANCOM, have a contract not directly with Zabbix, but with the Czech company initMax, which is also a premium partner of Zabbix. Earlier this year we managed to sign a contract with them, and I was already thinking about this summit as a reward for my team. In the end, I was able to get tickets for half of the team: I, Peto Bikki, Mato Sabo and Emil Halko. The guys have worked very hard all year and had really great results, so this reward was more than deserved and everyone really enjoyed it a lot.

CANCOM Slovakia: Let’s start from the beginning. In the photos published on LinkedIn, we even saw you in the Zabbix office. Was that also part of the summit?

Yes, the visit to their office was basically a little warm up before the summit itself. The conference started on Friday morning, and we arrived in Riga a day earlier, on Thursday, for lunch. They had everything well organised and we were driven everywhere we needed to go by Bolt. The first item on the agenda was an “Open office day”, with a tour of their premises and an interesting program. I have to say that this was probably one of the highlights of the whole summit, even though it was not directly part of it. The whole tour of the office was done in the form of a quiz, and alongside the introduction of the various departments we were given quiz questions to answer. As a reward we were then each given some small attention. After the office tour we moved on to the welcome party which was held at the brewery. In addition to the delicious food, they had prepared competitions for us such as an arm-wrestling competition.

CANCOM Slovakia: Do you remember any questions from the quiz?

From warm-up questions like how many tables are in a given room, to the main Zabbix programming language, to the number of partner companies or the names of the meeting rooms, which are named after different main locations…

CANCOM Slovakia: Well, we can see that you had a great time before the summit even started. Did the conference continue in such a cheerful spirit?

The conference and all the activities around it were well organized. The very first lecture on Friday morning was one of the most interesting. The founder and current CEO of Zabbix, Alexei Vladishev, opened the conference and gave us an overview of the company’s vision and immediate plans. Zabbix is basically an open-source application that is available for free. As part of the vision that Alexei presented, he noted that they continue to plan to offer their app for free. A lot of monitoring applications do not work on this principle, and you need to buy expensive licenses. Zabbix is different in this way and you, as a user, can download the app for free and then purchase technical support from them. That’s how we do it here at CANCOM. In theory, you can download it from home without the possibility of technical support.In addition to the vision, the CEO of Zabbix also presented plans for the next period and showed us the new version of the application, which will be released in February.

CANCOM Slovakia: Which lectures did you find interesting?

The whole conference was very technical and there were many speakers from different Zabbix customers and partners. Mainly they presented different examples from practice. It was very technical in some parts to the point where I got lost in it, but some of the examples were very intriguing. For example, one presenter showed us how Zabbix can monitor the underground throughout London. Then there was a Finn who uses Zabbix to monitor his whole house and has all sorts of interesting smart home settings. For example, when the system detects that someone has broken into his house, a video of the burglar is projected on the TV with the message: Think if you really want to steal something.

CANCOM Slovakia: You mentioned that you were invited to the conference by Init Max. Did they also give a lecture during the conference?

Yes, they had. Their lecture was technical, so the technicians were really enjoying themselves. Their lecture was about automation use cases and they presented mainly different examples from practice.

CANCOM Slovakia: How do you evaluate this conference overall. What did you take away from it?

The guys had the opportunity to participate in workshops where they could try the upcoming version of Zabbix which was definitely beneficial. For me personally, the most important thing was that we could meet and get to know the whole Zabbix community better. In addition to that, we also got to directly meet the CEO of Zabbix, Alexei Vladishev, and various other partners. For me, as a manager, this was just the most important and beneficial part of the whole event. We were even invited to a Q&A directly with Alexei, where only representatives of Zabbix’s biggest customers were present and suggestions for improving the app itself were openly discussed. I also very much appreciated the strategic discussions with initMAX CEO Tomas Hermanek, which were also very beneficial.