About the Author

Alan Wijntje has been working in the IT field since 2000 when he started out as a simple technician providing local IT support to various companies.

Figuring out why something broke (and then fixing it) soon became his specialty, and he outgrew this job within a couple of years; his employer was quick to recognize this, and within days, he was given a new assignment to work on the NOC for a major Dutch ISP.

After settling in, Alan quickly started to get to grips with the various monitoring systems and was soon making various improvements.

His love for Linux was a great asset when he was granted more and more freedom to tinker with various systems, including Netcool OMNIbus and Nagios.

After three years (and a company merger), Alan moved to another department that was solely responsible for all monitoring systems (most notable were Netcool OMNIbus and Nagios), and he was put in charge of all Nagios-based systems.

Running a lot of separate Nagios systems was, however, a lot of work and soon plans were made to move to a more user-friendly, flexible, and scalable solution.

Opsview was introduced as the replacement, and the system was built in record time after which Alan spent most of his time writing new plugins, fixing plugins, thinking up new ways of tackling various monitoring requirements (such as using Selenium for web-based tests), and so on.

After about three years of being the Opsview administrator, Alan again moved his department to join one of the networking teams (his other passion) where he got to play around with data center switches, virtual switches, and firewalls.

Although, technically, he is no longer an Opsview administrator, he still loves to help out (sometimes a bit too much some would say), write plugins, and even spend lots of time on the Opsview forum and the #opsview IRC channel helping others out.

Alan has worked for the Dutch company, QNH, since he started in IT, and over the years, they have always been quick to recognize his interests and talents and have helped him develop these skills (even some he never knew he had).