[AusNOG] Network monitoring software

[Lindsay Hill]

Solarwinds is ~$25K for an unlimited NPM license. Much less if you have a
smaller network. If you think that is very expensive, you've never seen the
pricing for some of the "Big 4" vendors. Gets very scary, very quickly if
you've got a big network.

If you're set on a commercial product, there's not a huge number of good
options that are going to come in at a significantly lower cost. Don't
forget to allow for implementation effort. No matter what any vendor says,
nothing is just 'install it & you're done.' Depending on your scale, the
license cost may only be a small part of the overall cost.

Figure out what features you really need/want. Figure out what scale you
need. Big distributed monitoring setup? Or just one server polling 50
devices? Add-ons that can bump up costs are NetFlow, Config Mgmt, IP SLA
monitoring, etc. Figure out what other integrations you might need - is
this just network monitoring, or do you want to add in server monitoring?
Or integrate with another server monitoring system? Trouble-ticketing?
Handle it in this tool, or create tickets in another system?

You might end up going with an Open Source core product, with add-on
support. As already mentioned, Zenoss is pretty good. NMIS from Opmantek is
pretty good too.

 - Lindsay

Disclaimer: I don't work for or with any of the vendors mentioned. NMS
consulting is part of what I do, but it's usually with other products.
Deliberately haven't mentioned them here, but happy to talk off-list.


On Sat, Apr 12, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Radek Tkaczyk <radek at tkaczyk.id.au> wrote:

>  Hi Guys,
>
>
>
> I have been asked to review our network monitoring software that we use
> internally to monitor our own infrastructure, but also to monitor the
> various layer 2 and layer 3 customer tails we have around the country.
>
>
>
> I'm looking for any recommendations from people who are happy with the
> products that they have inhouse. Looking for a commercial product really
> (as long as it's not ridiculously expensive).
>
>
>
> At my previous employers we have used PRTG and Solarwinds, which were OK,
> but I know Solarwinds was very expensive. One important feature that we
> need is a device dashboard that will show us the status and details of a
> device like IP addresses, IOS and firmware versions, error stats, etc.
>
>
>
> Any suggestions from fellow ausnoggers here?
>
>
>
> Regards,
>
>
>
> Radek
>
> Ph: 0413 383 231
>
> radek at tkaczyk.id.au
>
>
>
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>
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