Speaker Interview: Michael Merideth

Mike Merideth, speaker at SCALE

Michael Merideth will be speaking at SCALE 13x on “The Open-Source Monitoring Landscape” on Sunday, Feb. 22 at 4:30 p.m. The SCALE Team asked him about his first talk at SCALE.

Q: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about your background?

A: Hi, I'm Mike Merideth. I'm the Senior Director of IT for VictorOps in Boulder, Colorado. I've been managing IT infrastructure for nearly 20 years now. I was lucky enough to start working in IT right as Linux was starting to gain popularity in corporate datacenters, and managing Linux has been my main focus throughout my career.

Everywhere I've worked, I've been managing platforms with a 24/7 availability requirement. I've been at ISPs, conferencing companies, Ad networks and everything in-between, and seen all kinds of scale, all kinds of load, and all kinds of failures. So I've always been interested in monitoring and alerting. Working at VictorOps is a dream job for me, helping solve problems for people just like myself.

Q: You're giving a talk on The Open-Source Monitoring Landscape. Without tipping your hand on the actual talk, can you give us an idea of what we might expect?

A: The area of monitoring and alerting has broadened and expanded in recent years, as the scale and architecture requirements of production platforms has evolved. I'll be talking about the different types of monitoring products (availability, time-series, and event-based) and calling out some of the more interesting open-source projects in those areas. I'll also be sharing some philosophical thoughts about how to architect and manage a complete monitoring solution.

Q: Is this your first visit to SCALE? If so, what are your expectations? If not, can you give us your impressions of the event?

A: Yes! This is my first SCALE, and my first visit to Los Angeles! I enjoy any opportunity to get together with Linux/OSS folks, and I'm quite excited to see some of the other sessions and really spend a few days immersed in the community. VictorOps is an event sponsor and so I'll also be spending some time "working the booth" myself. I'm looking forward to introducing people to what we do, and hearing feedback from my peers in the industry.

[SCALE Team interview by Hannah Anderson.]