We recognize outstanding achievers within the worldwide Nagios community through our MVP award program. The MVPs are listed in no particular order.
Nagios MVPs are chosen based on their contributions in various areas, including:
As a way of saying thanks for all their efforts, we provide Nagios MVPs with benefits that include a free registration to the next Nagios World Conference.
Rob has been working with Nagios professionally since 2005. He is a Nagios forum enthusiast and is constantly helping others.
Rob is an IT Consultant at Deltics, a system integrator, Nagios reseller and service company located in the Netherlands. He has been using Nagios professionally since 2005. He has also been working with Linux and open source for over 15 years. As a Red Hat Certified Engineer since 2000, he prefers working with RedHat based operating systems like Redhat, CentOS and Fedora. As Deltics became a Nagios reseller last year, he hopes he can do even more Nagios in the Benelux and Germany.
Charles has been active on the Nagios forum and has been extremely helpful in driving product development.
Charles has been a Network Administrator at Snap-on Tools in Kenosha, WI for 4 years. Six months after he was hired he was tasked with unifying Snap-on’s infrastructure monitoring from several monitoring solutions to just one and was given the task of implementing Nagios XI across all Snap-on locations worldwide. When this project began, Charles had no knowledge or experience with any Nagios products, and minimal Linux experience. Three years later Charles is the sole Nagios Administrator for over 1100 hosts and 12,000 services across over 70 locations worldwide and has gone from frequenting the Nagios support forums asking questions to answering them.
Mike has worked with Nagios since 2010, is an official Nagios training partner, and a multi year speaker at the Nagios World Conference.
Mike developed a Linux training company in 1990 and has been involved in writing, consulting and training for Nagios since 2010. Special interest with Nagios is the rapid deployment and efficient management of large implementations. Mike is currently writing a program for buying and selling stock options.
Eric Loyd has been a speaker at every Nagios World Conference since 2012, received a Nagios MVP award in 2014, and was a winner in the 2015 Nagios Log Server contest. Mr. Loyd is a 25+ year IT professional, musician, photographer, amateur astronomer, and serial entrepreneur. His experience with Nagios started in 2004. Bitnetix, the company he founded, is a Nagios reseller and consulting company. SmartVox, his second company, makes extensive use of Nagios to adjust resources to provide dynamically sized VoIP services to small businesses and non-profits.
Mr. Loyd is in the process of co-founding EverWatch Global, a Nagios consulting company that will take over for Bitnetix when complete. He lives near Rochester, New York with his long-time girlfriend (a 2014 Nagios World Conference speaker on using Nagios to monitor beehives), two and a half really awesome cats, and a handful of Raspberry Pis.
Willem has been a large contributor to the Nagios Support Forums and a great member in the Nagios Community.
From Willem: “I started my career in IT in 2004, working for the department of economics of Belgium. It turned out this was not the job for me, but it lead me to my current job at Digipolis. As a server and storage engineer for my beloved city, Ghent, I get the chance to contribute to important projects I can fully support. It’s also a job that offers a lot of variety and challenges me on a day to day basis. Of course, it also introduced me to Nagios. And so, my enthusiasm for open source was born. In the beginning it was just something that was related to work, but as time went by, my passion for open source grew, and so did the amount of time that I spend on Nagios (sometimes to the slight dismay of my fiancé). The Nagios support team and the entire Nagios community provided me with so much knowledge about monitoring and scripting. I can only be grateful for the great honor to be chosen as MVP.”
Troy is a Nagios Contractor, 3 time MVP winner, 3 year conference speaker, and (self proclaimed) first person to write and share a XI wizard and component.
From Troy: “Troy is a self-described jack of all trades. He has been an Independent Contractor for Nagios Enterprises, LLC since April 2014 and currently works remotely from Australia. Troy has recently come to the conclusion that Perl is his favorite language to code in, and he enjoys water skiing and wakeboarding, Nagios development, and staying fit.”
Eric has been a large contributor to the Nagios Support Forums, answering 476 forum posts since May. Eric is also a 3 year conference speaker, and “Social Media Nagios Championer”.
From Eric: “Eric Loyd is the founder and CEO of Bitnetix Incorporated, an IT consulting and systems integration company located in Rochester, New York. Bitnetix has been providing VoIP service to small businesses and non-profits since 2007. In 2012, Bitnetix formed SmartVox and re-designed their global VoIP service offering to take advantage of the AWS platform. Mr. Loyd presented at Nagios World Conferences in 2012 and 2013. He has over 25 years of IT experience, 10 years in senior management, and is a musician, photographer, amateur astronomer, and aspiring serial entrepreneur.”
Janice has tested and worked closely with our Core developers to help enhance the new Core JSON CGI’s. She is also a 2 time conference speaker.
From Janice: “Janice Singh has worked at NASA Ames Research Center for 12 (non-consecutive) years. She has been using Nagios Core for the last 4 years.”
Bryan has played a large role in testing new features of our products, and working closely with our technical team. He has also created a mod_gearman UI component and SmokePing Viewer for Nagios XI.
From Bryan: “Bryan Heden fills the role of Systems Developer and Administrator at Agile Networks, headquartered in Canton, Ohio. Upon his arrival at Agile, Heden was presented with the challenge of monitoring hundreds of devices simultaneously on Agile’s statewide network. Today, Agile utilizes Nagios XI with customized configuration wizards, components, and plugins. Over 10,000 services are being monitored with more being added every day.”
Chitose has helped find countless bugs as we worked through the Internationalization in our products. She has also translated thousands of lines of code to Japanese, and most recreation file in less than 24 hours of the release of Nagios XI.
James has a strong IT background and Nagios experience. Time and time again James has helped other Nagios Core and Nagios XI users on the Nagios forums.
From James: “I have worked in the IT field since 1989, when I started at a local computer store. I did a bit of moving around the job market during the nineties landing in 2000 at a local steel mill. It is there where I got my first taste of monitoring and a very early version of Nagios. Over the years, our core installation grew, while our staffing shrunk. I convinced the company to purchase Nagios XI to save on my administration time and I quickly fell in love with it. In late 2012, I moved jobs to my current position, as full time Systems Monitoring Administrator for a major clothing retailer. I quickly convinced them to purchase Nagios XI and ditch the overly expensive tool they were using.
I spend my days adding hosts to XI and thinking of ways to make it better in our environment. Part of that means keeping an eye on the Nagios XI community forums to keep on top of problems other users are experiencing before they become issues for me. I also try to help out other users with issues that I have experienced as well. I also have no problem sharing my developments and ideas; for example, my on call rotation handling or checking for new mount points.”
William has been an active contributor to Nagios for many years, including the creation of numerous plugins and continued activity on the Nagios mailing list.
From William: “William is an open-source developer and systems architect consultant who has contributed to Nagios Core and has been developing Nagios plugins and addons for the last 10 years. In the 1990s has has worked as a network engineer for regional ISP helping to build what became known as an Internet. In addition to Nagios his open source contributions include Linux kernel and several gnu utilities. He is also currently pursuing PhD degree at the University of California where his research interests include parallel and distributed computing, games theory, graph theory, cognitive science and systems modeling in social science.”
Dan has been a key player in the testing and bug reporting of Nagios Core 4 as well as an active member of the Nagios mailing list helping other community members.
From Dan: “Dan has been working on the IT field for 18 years now. He started off as an HP-UX and network admin for a private college, then went to work for the University of Iowa becoming one of the first Red Hat Certified Engineers in 1999, and then being certified for AIX. After the University he started his own IT consulting company working with small businesses which included monitoring with a highly customized build of NetSaint/Nagios for a distributed monitoring system. Ever since that time Dan has been enthusiastic about using Nagios and trying to support it where he can. Now having a family with 3 dogs and 4 kids takes a lot of his free time, he still enjoys working on new Nagios solutions and updates, along with working on his car, playing with new tech gear, and just relaxing with a good drink.”
Gary has been extremely active in the last year helping community members on the Nagios Forum.
From Gary: “I finished my degree in Math and found work at an IT company as an intern. One of my early projects was to investigate a number of Networking Monitoring solutions and create a presentation for the managers. One of the first I looked at was Nagios (as one of our clients use it) and at first it seemed a bit daunting, but the support was the best by far. Moved around to a few others but was always leaning more towards Nagios. After all the great help I received (I was a complete novice in actual IT work, had never used Linux before) I decided I should try my best and give something back to the community and help people who were in the same situation as me. Otherwise, I’ve started learning programming and am looking into automating some of our testing and sending reports directly to Nagios.”
Troy Lea is a self-described jack of all trades. His background is in Microsoft products starting in 1995 with DOS and Windows 3.11.
From Troy: “I have worked for various IT consulting companies supporting small businesses who needed IT support and have also spent some time working for a dedicated IT department in the engineering sector. In 2006 I implemented a hosted environment using VMware ESX and Windows 2003 / Exchange 2003 based on the “Microsoft Hosted Messaging And Collaboration” solution. These days everyone calls this cloud computing. This is the environment I continue to maintain and upgrade. In 2009 when looking at monitoring products for our hosted environment we came across Nagios XI. This is where I saw how flexible the product was and I started created Wizards for Nagios XI. Since then I have also created documentation, plugins and components for Nagios XI.
To an administrator that is new to Nagios XI it can get a bit confusing trying to learn how to configure Nagios. You might download a plugin from the Nagios Exchange, but what is the next step? When I work out how to monitor xyz device in my environment I then am able to turn around and write a Nagios XI wizard for that xyz device. When someone downloads this wizard from the Nagios Exchange all they need to do is step through the wizard and after a few mouse clicks they are monitoring the same xyz device in their environment. This is where my passion lies in creating configuration wizards, making things easier for other administrators out there! I also enjoy a good game of darts, music festivals and social dynamics.”
Andreas Ericsson is an active committer to the Nagios Core project and has volunteered his time to help improve Nagios over the past several years. Andreas has played a huge role in the development of Nagios Core 4 and improving the scalability of Nagios Core.
According to Andreas, he “loves kids but couldn’t eat a whole one himself.” From Andreas: I’m a nerd in every aspect of life, so I never do anything without researching it fully. Having chosen Nagios as my monitoring daemon of choice means it’s clearly the most awesome one. My spare time is currently spent working out, partying, playing poker and hanging out in front of the ps3 with my most excellent girlfriend, who generally tries to avoid household chores by attempting, and failing, to beat me in Clash of Heroes.”
John started out as a hobbyist programmer but then moved on to study Network Engineering along with CCNA and CCNP before deciding what he really wanted to do was work on server and SAN infrastructure.
From John: “During the final year of my degree I was given the opportunity to lead a small project team with our chosen task of designing a scalable network monitoring solution; we ended up choosing Nagios as the base. This small project directly lead to my role within Kmart Australia deploying Nagios across the business. I’ve now worked there for two years as the network monitoring and server scripting/tools development SME along with performing standard server admin duties largely including Linux (SLES, Red Hat, CentOS), Windows server, Active Directory and VMware ESX. I’m very happy with all the support the Nagios team and the community has provided me with over the years and I’m glad that I’ve been able to give something back.”
Rodrigo has played a large part in the expansion of the Nagios Community Network in Brazil.
Not to be confused with the famous footballer from Brazil, Rodrigo is a knowledgeable community member who has helped expand the reach of Nagios XI and Core to the Brazilin community.
Luis has also helped build the Nagios Community Network in the Dominican Republic.
As an employee of Nagios Enterprises, Luis has been a great addition to the team and is always looking for ways to better the company.
Stephen works as a reseller in Australia for IceSystems. His contributions to Nagios’ scalability have been top notch. His work has been with large implementation prototyping, high-availability, and redundancy environments.
We have learned a lot from Stephen and are extremely thankful for his contributions to Nagios and the community.
Nathan Broderick is an accomplished, seasoned Networking Engineer for Nu Skin Enterprises.
He was born in Provo, Utah. He has worked for 10 years as a system administrator in CentOS, Redhat, BSD, and HPUX systems. He has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Steven Henagar’s College. His hobbies are programming and studying Arabic with his free time. Nathan has two kids and a beautiful wife who keeps him sane.
Troy Lea is a self-described jack of all trades. His background is in Microsoft products starting in 1995 with DOS and Windows 3.11.
From Troy: “I have worked for various IT consulting companies supporting small businesses who needed IT support and have also spent some time working for a dedicated IT department in the engineering sector. In 2006 I implemented a hosted environment using VMware ESX and Windows 2003 / Exchange 2003 based on the “Microsoft Hosted Messaging And Collaboration” solution. These days everyone calls this cloud computing. This is the environment I continue to maintain and upgrade. In 2009 when looking at monitoring products for our hosted environment we came across Nagios XI. This is where I saw how flexible the product was and I started created Wizards for Nagios XI. Since then I have also created documentation, plugins and components for Nagios XI.
To an administrator that is new to Nagios XI it can get a bit confusing trying to learn how to configure Nagios. You might download a plugin from the Nagios Exchange, but what is the next step? When I work out how to monitor xyz device in my environment I then am able to turn around and write a Nagios XI wizard for that xyz device. When someone downloads this wizard from the Nagios Exchange all they need to do is step through the wizard and after a few mouse clicks they are monitoring the same xyz device in their environment. This is where my passion lies in creating configuration wizards, making things easier for other administrators out there! I also enjoy a good game of darts, music festivals and social dynamics.”
Roy currently works as a senior network consultant at Khipu-Networks Ltd, UK with extensive experience in the field of Network Security, Automation and Monitoring. The company designs and sells solutions that enable to secure, audit and improve reliability of wired and wireless networks.
As a senior engineer Roy is responsible for analysis of customer requirements and and designing and deploying a solution starting from setting up pre-site meetings to seeing through deployment of a solution. He builds and maintains internal company IT resources such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Apache/Tomcat Web server on Debian and Centos Linux platforms and has integrated network monitoring tools based on Nagios.
Roy previously worked as a research assistant at HAW Hamburg Germany developing and tested IP address assignment protocols on the Omnet++ platform. He holds a MSc in Network Computing from University of Reading, UK and B.Sc in Electronics, University of Pune, India.
John started out as a hobbyist programmer but then moved on to study Network Engineering along with CCNA and CCNP before deciding what he really wanted to do was work on server and SAN infrastructure.
From John: “During the final year of my degree I was given the opportunity to lead a small project team with our chosen task of designing a scalable network monitoring solution; we ended up choosing Nagios as the base. This small project directly lead to my role within Kmart Australia deploying Nagios across the business. I’ve now worked there for two years as the network monitoring and server scripting/tools development SME along with performing standard server admin duties largely including Linux (SLES, Red Hat, CentOS), Windows server, Active Directory and VMware ESX. I’m very happy with all the support the Nagios team and the community has provided me with over the years and I’m glad that I’ve been able to give something back.”
Andreas Ericsson is an active committer to the Nagios Core project and has volunteered his time to help improve Nagios over the past several years.
According to Andreas, he “loves kids but couldn’t eat a whole one himself.” From Andreas: I’m a nerd in every aspect of life, so I never do anything without researching it fully. Having chosen Nagios as my monitoring daemon of choice means it’s clearly the most awesome one. My spare time is currently spent working out, partying, playing poker and hanging out in front of the ps3 with my most excellent girlfriend, who generally tries to avoid household chores by attempting, and failing, to beat me in Clash of Heroes.”
Ton has been writing code for the Nagios Plugins since 2002 and has retired from the team lead position in 2011. He has also been a Nagios Core committer since 2009.
As he loves testing, Ton has integrated test suites into the Nagios Plugins and Nagios Core to provide automated quality assurance which helps keep the software as reliable as possible. Ton likes having battles with his kids, dancing with his wife, playing football and programming in perl, though not necessarily at the same time.
Todd has over 16 years experience in Unix and Linux working for some of the biggest names in technology. He has been recognized for his contributions at places like NEC, Northrop Grumman, Hewlett Packard, and Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation.
Over the years he has managed, architected, engineered, and constructed large deploys of Linux and Nagios at all of these companies. His ability to look at a problem from multiple points of view and to find a solution, have served him well over the years. This has been especially handy in his deployment of Nagios. Often the question of what to monitor is followed by how do we monitor that. He has often said, “For every Unix or Linux problem there are 7 good ways to solve it. The trick is knowing which one is right for this instance.”
To sum him up you need only realize that his first love is computer technology and it shows in both his skills and his willingness to pass his knowledge on to others.
Matt has made numerous contributions to Nagios and the greater sysadmin community through advocacy, writing, and support. He was recently awarded the Chuck Yerkes Award at the LISA 2011 conference for his contributions to sysadmins.
You can view his blog at http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog
Nagios, the Nagios logo, and Nagios graphics are the servicemarks, trademarks, or registered trademarks owned by Nagios Enterprises. All other servicemarks and trademarks are the property of their respective owner. Website Copyright © 2009-2024 Nagios Enterprises, LLC. All rights reserved.