The Zeek project is creating a Testing Subgroup for community participation. 

The goal of this subgroup is to stress-test new versions of Zeek with real live traffic from a variety of environments to identify problems and bugs early, to ensure that new Zeek releases are stable and ready for the Zeek community. 

This blog post details the outline and structure of this subgroup. We also are seeking applicants. If you are an institution that can help us test Zeek, reach out to us to join as a member of this subgroup. 


The Testing subgroup will consist of Zeek developers as well as external participants. Members of the Testing subgroup have access to a private Slack channel, and mailing list, for information exchange. These communication channels will be used to communicate testing needs and test results. If problems or bugs are found during testing, Zeek developers will work to quickly fix them.

Requirements for participation:

The Testing subgroup is seeking members who have spare systems/taps and the cycles to occasionally run development versions of Zeek, release candidates or pre-releases on their live institutional traffic *in parallel* to their production Zeek infrastructure. You, as a member of the testing subgroup, will report back to the developers if you are seeing smooth stable runs or if new or previously unknown bugs manifest. 

You’d be the one to identify issues and report back to the developers, who will do their best to fix them as soon as possible. We don’t anticipate too many requirements from the Dev team. Occasionally developers may ask you to test some specific branch. Mostly you’d end up running what will become the next stable release. You are just needed to report back performance numbers or other problems you notice.

Members of the Testing group should generally be aiming to run a current release version on their operational site (optimally the current feature release, but the LTS release also is fine), so that they can compare the behavior with the test version running in parallel..

Why you should join:

In return for being a member of the Testing subgroup, you will have the advantage of being in close, continuous contact with the developers. You also get to try the latest and greatest features from an emerging code base. One great advantage you will have is that you will be prepared to run the next Zeek release well in advance. You will know it’s working for you even before it is published! Furthermore you will have the direct attention of the developers to identify and fix problems local to your environment. 

How to Apply:

Please apply by filling this form : https://forms.gle/5L6v6oUYu2U6j3fv9 

Zeek development team and core-committers will review the applicants. We are primarily looking for a variety of network environments – so please don’t hesitate in applying. The “Requirements for participation” section above describes the fitness criteria. 

Once we review all the submissions we will get back to you. In case of any questions, please feel free to reach out to testing@zeek.org

IMPORTANT:  At the beginning only 5 slots are open for sites to become a member of this group. So – if you’re interested, sign up soon!!

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