It’s been a while since I attended what used to be LOSUG (London Solaris User Group), a name which seems to have been last officially used in 2011. Nowadays it’s just the UKOUG Solaris Special Interest Group. The main thing is that the key people are the same although there were a lot fewer people there than I expected on my first visit to Bonhill House, Moorgate. That might have been due to the terrible wet weather.

The venue is great and we are back to having hot food (excellent food too) and beer after the talks, as we used to get in the Sun days (in the Oracle Office we were relegated to sandwiches and crisps). The only drawback seems to be a strict chucking out policy at 9pm.

Anyway, the talks…Phil Harman kicked off with “Integrating ZFS Performance Data Using DTrace & Zabbix” show and tell, followed by Tomasz Kloczko with “Zabbix & Solaris”.

Zabbix is not something I’d heard of before – no reason why I should have – but I am always keen to hear talks involving ZFS and Dtrace, both great technologies. The takeaway from Phil’s talk for me was the fact that “tying ZFS and Zabbix allows you to do forensics” plus the fact that sampled traffic from a live system could then be replayed as IO on a new system without the app. All interesting stuff to be filed away for future reference.

An added benefit was meeting some old colleagues and I will certainly make more of an effort to attend Bonhill House more frequently in the future.