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 - j...@impulse.net Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
