Program description
Sensu, Inc. supports the extended community of monitoring meetups.
Sensu is currently working on expanding the monitoring community around the globe, and we’re happy to support new meetup communities.
If you’re interested in starting a monitoring user group or need support, email community@sensu.io.
Meetup best practices
Here’s a list of suggestions and tips on starting a new meetup group:
Create the meetup
If you start a brand-new meetup that aims to cover the whole monitoring landscape, we recommend to use one of the following naming conventions:
<Location> Monitoring User Meetup
<Location> Monitoring User Group
The description of the group is left to the discretion of the organizers.
Example:
Let’s get together to share the #monitoringlove and chat about all things monitoring as they intersect with other pertinent topics such as continuous integration/delivery, security, containers, Kubernetes, microservices, IoT, DevOps, and cloud.
In order for your meetup to be as visible as possible, you should add a relevant list of tags.
For example, “Monitoring”,"DevOps", “Incident Management”, "Containers", "Microservices", "Kubernetes", “Continuous Delivery”, “System Administration”, “Monitoring Automation”, “Remote monitoring of sensors”, “Application Monitoring”, “DevOps Automation”, “Configuration Management”, “Application Performance Monitoring”, “Application Performance Monitoring”, “System Management and Monitoring”, “Network Management and Monitoring”, etc.
Establish a regular cadence
The most important thing is to keep an active group, with frequent events (ideally once a month and on a regular cadence such as the first Monday of the month).
Sustaining a group yourself can be difficult to manage. Ideally you should have a team of passionate and committed co-organizers.
Joining forces helps spread the load and expands the network.
Find speakers
We recommend providing a form in order to allow people to submit their talk proposal.
When possible, take care to review speaker presentations.
Attend conferences (e.g., DevOpsDays, SRECon, LISA, Velocity, and local meetups about containers, Devops, etc.) where you can find speakers and meet a lot of people who are into monitoring.
Find sponsors and a place to meet
Contact local tech companies — many of them are interested in hosting these kind of events.
We recommend finding a central location. For example, downtown in most cities is ideal because it’s easier to access for most attendees.
Schedule a new event
It’s all about the agenda. Each talk description should contain:
- A short bio of the speaker
- A compelling title
- A paragraph describing the content of the presentation/demo
If you’re planning a hands-on demo, make sure the venue’s WiFi can handle the number of attendees.
Also make sure to check you’re not limited by some kind of quotas (cloud provider).
The choice of date and time matters. Most meetups are on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, or Thursdays after work.
Booking the room
If you’re limited by the room capacity, we recommend doing an overbooking.
Most of the time you can expect 30% attrition.
We recommend sending a reminder message to the meetup group to ask the people to free their place if they can’t come.
Post recordings and slides after the event
If possible, we encourage you to record videos of the presentations and take pictures for social media and the event page to share afterwards. This helps others benefit from your user group and is a great way to thank your speakers.
Don’t forget to share the slides with all members after the event and thank your sponsors!
Get swag and refreshments for your first meetup
If you’ve just created a meetup and have scheduled your first meeting, send an email to community@sensu.io. We’ll send you stickers for your first meetup and shirts for organizers. We’ll also sponsor food for your first event.
Please include the following in your email:
- Date of the meeting
- Number of organizers and shirt sizes
- Address and phone number for swag delivery
Create a Slack team for your meetup
Some user groups have found it helpful to have a Slack team for the group, in addition to the meetup page, for discussions and real time conversations.
Promote your event
Beyond posting the event on the Meetup page, you can ask other local meetups to post your event on their Meetup pages. Many groups are happy to do so, especially if you return the favor!
Sensu will be happy to promote your meetings on our social channels. Email community@sensu.io and let us know when your next meetup is coming up.
Follow the Code of Conduct
Our Meetup program follows our Community Guidelines and Code of Conduct.
Sample agendas
Most groups meet for a couple hours after the work day. A typical time is 6 - 8, with the first 30 minutes dedicated to mingling and getting food and the last 30 minutes for future meeting topics, input, and mingling. Please see the sample agendas below.
Please join us for our next monitoring meetup! We’ll have [name of speaker], [title of speaker] join us to talk about [description of talk]. (Include a short speaker bio, if possible).
Sample Agenda 1
6-6:30 Socialize / enjoy refreshments
6:30 - 7:00 Talk title, speaker name
7:00pm - 7:30pm Talk title, speaker name
7:30pm - 8:00pm Plan for next time / mingle
Sample Agenda 2
Please join us for our next monitoring meetup! We’ll be discussing [Name of Topic]. (Include any information on preparing for discussion, if needed.)
6-6:30 Socialize / Enjoy refreshments
6:30 - 7:30 Discussion on [topic]
7:30pm - 8:00pm Plan for next time / mingle
Ask for help
If you have any other questions, hit us up in the Sensu Community Slack.