[AusNOG] Network monitoring software

[Beeson, Ayden]

Just a heads up, Solarwinds are always willing to do discounts to get you signed up :-)

There are a lot of cool features in npm that are worth the money, but your mileage will vary on what you are importing and how much effort you put into the initial setup.

There is a maintenance component too that gives you updates etc, it's not cheap but it's not a tremendous cost.

I remember getting some indicative pricing on other big 4 providers, it was pretty scary!

On 12/04/2014 11:38 am, Lindsay Hill <lindsay.k.hill at gmail.com> wrote:
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<mailto: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<mailto:radek at tkaczyk.id.au>


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