Contact: Fritz Zaucker Phone: +41 62 775 9903 Fax: +41 62 775 9905 eMail: fritz.zaucker@oetiker.ch 6.12.2006 Ref. Sage2006 / fz-oe Swiss Open Source Software Developer receives SAGE 2006 Outstanding Achievement Award FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Wednesday, December 6th, 2006, Washington DC The Swiss Open Source Software developer Tobias Oetiker together with Dave Rand receives the 2006 SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award for the creation of the Open Source Software tools MRTG and RRDtool. In their commendation, SAGE points out: "Before the creation of these tools, the only people that could reap the benefits of long-term, historical statistics gathering were people with multimillion dollar budgets. MRTG and RRDtool democratized, and therefore popularized, historical data collection. As a result, network utilization planning has gone from being guesswork to a fine art. These tools have also been leveraged to track a wide array of resources ranging from disk I/O stats to CPU and memory usage to license server data. Thanks to Tobias, Dave, and their team, system and network administrators are no longer limited to fire-fighting when our resources are overloaded. We can now easily access network and system data in an intuitive form to predict and plan for upgrades months in advance." The award ceremony took place today at the opening session of the 20th Conference on Large Installation System Administration (LISA) at Washington DC. About MRTG, RRDtool, SmokePing MRTG and RRDtool are freely (as in freedom and in free beer) available software tools for the collection and graphical display of time series data and are mainly deployed to monitor computer networks and network traffic. These programs are installed at hundred thousands of sites world wide, monitoring everything from small local networks to large IT infrastructures of internationally operating telecom providers. SmokePing, another member of the family of tools developed by Tobias Oetiker is used for the measurement and display of line quality parameters in internet connections. For more information about MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing visit http://oss.oetiker.ch About Tobias Oetiker Tobias Oetiker recently started working for OETIKER+PARTNER AG specializing in system management services and the continued development of his open source tools MRTG, RRDtool and SmokePing. For more information about Tobias visit http://tobi.oetiker.ch About OETIKER+PARTNER AG Oetiker+Partner AG is a Swiss consultancy company and service provider based in Olten specializing in personal and organizational development, management and information technology. For more information about OETIKER+PARTNER AG visit http://www.oetiker.ch About SAGE and Usenix SAGE, The System Administrators Guild, is an international membership society and a special interest group of the USENIX Association. It is organized to advance the status of computer system administration as a profession; establish standards of professional excellence and recognize those who attain them; develop guidelines for improving the technical and managerial capabilities of members of the profession; and promote activities that advance the state of the art or the community. Since 1975, the USENIX Association has brought together the community of engineers, system administrators, scientists, and technicians working on the cutting edge of the computing world. For more information about SAGE, visit http://www.sage.org. For more information about USENIX, visit http://www.usenix.org.
Since I learned last week, that I am going to receive the SAGE Outstanding Achievement Award today, I have been thinking about how to explain this to my non-geek friends. Is it more of an oscar for computer specialists or rather a noble price for system administrators? In any event I am happy and greatful to receive this award. I would also like to extend my thanks to all the users and contributors to these tools who have made them such a success over the years. Especially to Dave Rand whos contributions got me back into working on MRTG back in 1996. In September I have finally quit my job at the University. I am now working in my own company specialising in system management and network monitoring. I am also at the moment talking to several parties who are interested in sponsoring MRTG and RRDtool development. I am confident that I will soon have more time to spend on improving and enhancing the tools than ever before. In other words, the award comes exactly at the right moment. Thank you very much !
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