Alerting systems, Logicmonitor and/or alternatives

Wed Jan 28 18:06:26 UTC 2015

I know that this topic has been kicking around for at least a decade,
but wanted to get current opinions of other network operators. Most of
us have explored Nagios, MRTG, and several front-ends for MRTG.

We are looking into a new player in the space called Logicmonitor. They
have a very functional and easy to navigate front end and configuration
tool, and I very much like the look-and-feel of their product.

What I don't like is that they only offer it as a cloud-based service.
Internal probes tie in to a "collector" which we maintain. The collector
then phones home over the Internet to their hosted service periodically
and they remotely analyze the data and generate alerts, plot graphs, etc.

>From a technical standpoint this adds more points of failure in series,
will cause missed alerts if their cloud-based service goes down (who is
guarding the guards?) will cause false alarms if their service is still
up but can't reach the collector, and doesn't give us a full view under
the hood.

Of course their sales guys are giving us "Our time and energy is
dedicated to reliability" and "professionally managed multi-carrier
highly secure data centers" language to encourage the warm fuzzies.

>From a scalability standpoint we incur ever-increasing recurring costs
as we grow and add monitored devices and services.

What's the collective opinion here? Is anyone using them or a similar
service? Are there non-cloud-based alternatives that are relatively easy
to set up and manage? We've explored Zabbix, Nagios, MRTG and its
various wrappers, and Intermapper. Anything else new on the horizon that
has a GUI front-end that is configurable without a lot of scripting
experience, etc.?

We would love to buy something that works for us and pay a reasonable
price for it, but I'm not particularly interested in the equivalent of
renting a time-share in order to monitor our networks.

--
Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay at impulse.net
Impulse Internet Service  -  http://www.impulse.net/
Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV