Shinken: Monitoring for mission-critical infrastructures

Who is...

Vladimir Kolla

Jean Gabès

Jean Gabès founder and CEO of Shinken Monitoring.

Company profile

Shinken

The interview

Q: What is your name?

My name is Jean Gabès, CEO of Shinken Monitoring. I have a long history as sysadmin working for both Athos and later Lectra, before founding Shinken.

Q: What is your product?

Shinken, a monitoring solution. I developed it by myself in my free time, because as a sysadmin I was in constant need of a simple supervision tool. Back then, I was heavily relying on Nagios, which is a very versatile software but with performance limits and worse, no evolution since 1999. Since it is open source, I could learn a lot from the code and build Shinken based on my specific needs. That was around 2008. I was testing a lot of ideas using Python to develop a performant tool. Once I had something I felt was presentable, I contacted Nagios and one of their competitors, but both of them were not interested to follow up on my project. About 2010 I open sourced my solution and quickly found a community of users that were sorely looking for a more performant Nagios alternative. A lot of large companies contacted me (including BMW and Total) and asked for supported, interfaces and industrial packs. I received a lot of help from UNITEC and the NAOS Cluster (Nouvelle Aquitance Open Source) to setup the Shinken company which I finally launched in 2013 together with a commercial partner. Among our first large clients was the Joint Directorate of Infrastructure Networks and Information Systems (DIRISI) and Société Générale. 

Today we have about 40 large clients and about twice that many SMEs, for whom we also provide "logistics" with our own platform. 

Q: Is it SaaS? PaaS? IaaS? Other?

Shinken is a SaaS product. We provide support services to large clients and 

Q: Are you a market leader? Who do you consider leader in your market? Does GAFAM play any role in your market?

GAFAM itself are not on this market, but many tools exist. The use case is usually the same: there are big machine parks which are often very heterogenous but need to work and operate together. There is some segmentation by country: in the US, Solarwind is widely used while in France, Centreon is one of the market leaders, but focusing on small and medium customers.

Q: What are the unique selling propositions of your product? How is your solution different or better than competing solutions?

Our engine is open source framework under GNU Affero GPL licence. We have an open source and an enterprise version. Compared to Nagios which uses 1 daemon/1block (monolithic), Shinken uses microservices with the possibility to scale a setup without having to redeploy everything. So there is a big difference in the approach to solution architecture. 

Q: What European policies do you suggest to ensure sustainable development of your technology and its adoption?

We must have a Small Business Act at the Europe. Public procurement is currently designed to eliminate small players such as Shinken because of too much administrative overhead. We must put in place some form of protectionism like a percentage of public procurement going to small European businesses. We also need a structure for SMEs to be able to respond to public procurement calls for tender. Historically in France, only large integrators like Capgemini or Athos have the resources and capabilities to reply to these type of tenders, but they do not provide services or support and they do not use or contribute to European or SME solutions. Because of companies of this type, we are very late in France in many digital markets.

Q: Can you give us an idea of sales/staff/clients/end users over the last 3 years?

We currently have between 10-15 employees. I have no idea how many end users use Shinken, since it is free software and we have no tracking. 

Q: Tell us about a successful implementation. How did you implement it, why was it a success, where is this implementation today? Plans for the future? How is the relation with the client? Did the client help you get other clients?

The French Ministry of the Armed Forces was using our open source version from early on. They reached out to Shinken requesting services and a licence for a virutalisation interface. Shinken is currently used by over 700 internal army staff with a central supervision unit. We spent a long time understanding the specific user service needs that had to be monitored and this way had a lot of feedback and confidence in the solution before it went live. The Ministry is still supporting us to continue development of Shinken. With that many users, they are quick to point out technical issues and needs which we are addressing and which eventually benefit everyone using the open source version of Shinken. Having the Ministry as a client over such a long time also helped us convince Société Générale to move to Shinken for their monitoring needs.