Why you should attend Sensu Summit (as told to your boss)

Copy and paste this email to your boss to help get approval to attend the Sensu Summit!

As you may know, we’re hosting our second-annual customer conference in Portland, August 21–23. We’ll hear from the best and brightest in ops and monitoring, get together for a community hack day, and close out the event with snacks and drinks at the Portland Art Museum’s sculpture garden.

Art Museum The Portland Art Museum at night. Beautiful, no? (Source)

To help you get there, we’ve come up with an email template to convince your boss on why you should attend. Bonus: if you submit a talk idea and it’s selected, your ticket is free!

Best of luck, and we hope to see you there!

Subject: Why I should attend Sensu Summit

Hi [Your Boss],

The more complex our architecture becomes, the more critical it is that we have a solution that allows us to effectively (and intelligently) monitor our systems. And, while the modern open source toolset is easily accessible, the real value in those tools is in the large communities that exist around them, and the best practices they have developed.

Sensu Summit (happening August 22–23 in Portland, Oregon) is a great opportunity both for me and [Your Company] to get the most out of our monitoring setup. Sensu’s monitoring framework is designed for complex architectures like ours, and their user conference will help me better understand the problems Sensu can solve and offer facetime with the community and engineers building Sensu.

Here’s a breakdown of the benefits:

  • Meeting with ~200 peers who are dealing with the same ops and monitoring challenges we are. I’ll learn how they tackle their biggest problems and come away with actionable solutions.
  • Contributing to Sensu code. I’ll learn about writing plugins alongside Sensu contributors, so we’ll be better equipped to solve problems when there isn’t an existing plugin.
  • Access to the engineers building Sensu. I’ll have a chance to meet with Sensu engineers and senior leadership, including the founding members.
  • Best practices and practical application. The first day offers technical talks, and the second gives me the chance to put those ideas into action.
  • Further learning on how to get the most value out of the tools we’re using with Sensu. Companies like Puppet, InfluxDB, Grafana, and Pagerduty are part of Sensu’s partner network, and will be at the event taking part in the talks and workshops.

Cost for attending Sensu Summit:

  • Tickets are $149 through July with this discount code — that’s 50% off the full price!
  • Airfare is [$price].
  • With Sensu’s conference rate, the hotel cost is $250/night at the Hotel Modera in Portland. Most of my meals are included with the conference.

With so much to learn, plus hands-on training and experience, Sensu Summit is a worthy investment for our company. You can learn more about the event in Sensu CEO Caleb Hailey’s recent blog post.

Thanks in advance for thinking it over, and I’m looking forward to your thoughts.

[Your Name]