Leon Adato is a Principal Technical Evangelist at Kentik, and has held multiple industry certifications over his 33 years in IT including Cisco, Microsoft, A+, and more. His experience spans financial, healthcare, food and beverage, and other industries.
Before coming to Kentik, he was a speaker and blogger in the monitoring and observability space for over at decade. His IT career began in 1989 and has led him through roles in classroom training, desktop support, sysadmin, and network engineering.
Leon has been with network monitoring for more than two decades, working with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, Nagios, Patrol, ZenOss, janky perl scripts, OpenView, SiteScope, SolarWinds, Grafana, Zabbix, New Relic, and (of course) Kentik. In the course of that work, he’s designed solutions for companies that ranged in size from modest (~10 systems); to significant (1,000 – 5,000 systems); to ludicrous (250,000 systems in 5,000 locations).
Kubecon 2023 was more than just another conference to check off my list. It marked my first chance to work in the booth with my incredible Kentik colleagues. It let me dive deep into the code, community, and culture of Kubernetes. It was a moment when members of an underrepresented group met face-to-face and experienced an event previously not an option.
The entire reason we have monitoring is to understand what users are experiencing with an application. Full stop. If the user experience is impacted, sound the alarm and get people out of bed if necessary. All the other telemetry can be used to understand the details of the impact. But lower-level data points no longer have to be the trigger point for alerts.
The most noticeable takeaway from All Things Open 2023 was how visibly and demonstrably people were there for the event itself. Not to check a box or browse the swag but to be together, show their support of open source, and glean every last bit of knowledge they could.
If there’s anything I’ve learned, monitoring data is the lifeblood of the business and a superpower for any IT practitioner. Monitoring allows organizations to react to changes, identify and recover, and understand the true health of the business.