Recommendation for customer monitoring network tool/portal for a large ISP

Jeff Gehlbach jeffg at opennms.org
Thu Oct 27 13:54:17 UTC 2011


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On 10/27/2011 04:45 AM, Alex Nderitu wrote:

> What would you recommend especially in the licensed/supported 
> options and not the free ones like Zabbix, Cacti, MRTG etc.

Those free options you mentioned are in fact licensed -- here's the
license for Zabbix:

http://bit.ly/sBCGJR

Cacti and MRTG are distributed under the same license.

Zabbix, at least, is supported commercially by a company consisting of
grown-ups who know what they're doing.  They can get their platform to
do really cool things and to scale better than you could do, because
they know the platform better than anybody else.  I work for another
company that has a similar relationship to a different free-software
management platform; see the domain part of my e-mail address if you
care which one it is.

Whichever platform you choose, you should be prepared to spend far
more on consulting (or pricey headcount) than on acquisition or
maintenance of hardware and software.  For any platform to scale to
the extent you're talking about, it's going to require extensive
expert customization as well as constant care and feeding.  I've been
managing networks in-house and in consulting roles for over a decade,
and this rule always applies.

My point in all this is that, while most free-software platforms suck
at scaling up because they're not designed for huge scale, you should
not dismiss this entire class of platforms out of hand any more than
you would dismiss all proprietary offerings on account of Orion NPM
missing the mark.

- -jeff
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