Introducing Jason Dixon, VP of Business Development
It is with great pleasure that we are able to formally introduce Jason Dixon as employee #10 at Sensu, Inc. and our new VP of Business Development! Jason’s qualifications may precede himself, but they are impressive nonetheless: roles in engineering, operations, and product development at companies like Heroku, GitHub, Dyn, Librato / SolarWinds, and Grafana Labsmake him unusually qualified. When you add to those credentials the fact that he is the founder of Monitorama, and now published author (!) of “Monitoring with Graphite”, Jason becomes – by my estimation – the most connected person in monitoring, and the ideal candidate to lead up business development efforts around Sensu.
In fact, he is so well qualified for this role that he has been able to launch a formal partner program for Sensu (one of the various things he will be responsible for), and secure a second wave of partners before I could find the time to publish this “we hired Jason Dixon!” blog post. ❤
About Jason
In his personal life, Jason is a husband, father, fan of electric skateboards and e-bikes, and Rocket League virtuoso. Professionally, Jason has a strong enthusiasm for observability systems (even for measuring his progress in Rocket League). As he likes to say, “if you can’t measure it, you’re not really running it in production” (though he doesn’t take credit for originating the phrase). This enthusiasm is complemented by a laser focus on improving user experiences, which has been a consistent theme throughout his career. Perhaps one of the best examples of this interest can be found woven through a series of events that began around the time of the #monitoringsucksmovement of 2011. The movement was informally inspired by a tweet.
Nagios sucks! We all put up w/ it. Good thing we have CM to make it bearable. #devops #chef #puppet
— eh 🍁 on the wind. (@portertech) May 24, 2011
Then there was a blog post (🙏 John Vincent), and the aforementioned twitter hashtag, #monitoringsucks. IRC meetings were organized. A vocabulary was established, and so on.
okay. ##monitoringsucks on freenode if you want to chime in #devops
— John 'dadpool' Vincent (@lusis) May 27, 2011
While not necessarily a direct response to this movement, Jason was thinking about the same problem, and prompting others to action (as an aside, I find it very interesting to read that blog post and realize Jason wrote those words within a week of the first commits to the Sensu project; great minds…). When a new hashtag appeared (#monitoringlove), Jason was quick to promote this more positive approach to rallying support for improving monitoring.
If you love monitoring, I encourage you to join #monitoringlove on IRC freenode.
— cereal eyes jason (@obfuscurity) October 16, 2012
Eventually, Jason’s passion for monitoring resulted in Monitorama, which was already in the early stages of formation around the time the #monitoringlove hashtag appeared; and the rest, as they say, is history.
Monitorama is officially scheduled for March 28-29 2013 at the Microsoft NERD Center in Boston. More details coming soon.
— Monitorama (@Monitorama) August 30, 2012
I like this story because it highlights my favorite thing about Jason: he’s made a career out of helping promote and improve the community dialog around monitoring systems as components, which resonates strongly with what we’re building at Sensu.
We’re very excited to call Jason a member of Team Sensu. I think you will be too.
#monitoringlove
One of very few photos in existence of cupcake awesomeness at Monitorama (source), moments before they were devoured by eager attendees.
A note about Sensu and Monitorama
Monitorama is our favorite tech conference of the year, and any single vendor having undue influence over the event would tarnish it (in our opinion). As such, Jason will continue to operate Monitorama as a vendor-neutral event, as he has done with previous employers (rather successfully I might add); and Sensu will continue to be a paying sponsor of Monitorama with no preferential treatment.
