Rihards Olups has over 15 years of experience in information technology, most of it with open source solutions. His foray into Zabbix, one of the leading open source enterprise-class monitoring solutions, was with the first public release back in 2001, which has allowed him to gain considerable knowledge on the subject. Previously employed by a government agency, Rihards was mostly involved in open source software deployment, ranging from server to desktop-grade software, with a big emphasis on Zabbix. Later, he joined Zabbix SIA, the company behind the software that this book is about, which allowed him to gain even more experience with the subject.
While at Zabbix, he helped Zabbix users and customers get the most value out of the monitoring tool and was responsible for delivering Zabbix training sessions that have been described by some participants as extremely practical and quite challenging.
He started working on the very first book on Zabbix, Zabbix 1.8 Network Monitoring, before joining Zabbix, and he finalized that book with even more in-depth details while helping advance Zabbix.
Rihards departed from Zabbix SIA and ended up seeing more of the user side again, including deployments of Zabbix in real-world environments.