[AusNOG] Network Management and Tools

[craig at askings.com.au]

> On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 1:56 AM, phil colbourn <philcolbourn at gmail.com>
>>
>> What concerns me is that once upon a time we used Nagios/NetSaint,
>> big-brother, cricket, MRTG, and looked at Rancid, Cacti, OpenNMS and
>> ZenOSS.
>> Have we moved in the wrong direction?
>
> What do you mean; people are apparently using less "integrated" NMSes,
> so this is a bad thing?  If so, I disagree.
>
> Big NMSes, million dollar software with $3000/day consultants, should
> this be encouraged?  I think not.  Instead, start from the ground up,
> with a few basic requirements.  You don't need to spend big money to
> do that.  Conversely, a million dollar price tag doesn't mean they
> have customers who use the software to do what you do. Shocking, I
> know.  The important part is that you need your best operators,
> architects and engineers to talk about this long enough to get a set
> of requirements and a design isolated.

At a previous job we had CA come in and demo their NMS. It was very nice,
flexible. Did root cause analysis etc. But during the entire process they
were very cagey about mentioning the price.

At the end of the trial, when they gave us the quote. The price was higher
than the cost of the mpls routers and switches they were monitoring.
Before anyone asks, the routers etc where bought new and not off Ebay.

Craig.