I agree with a number of people out here. ~$160 USD/year for a monitoring solution is nothing and the thought of having to manually build chart templates in Cacti/MRTG sounds stupid. Sure, tons of people can do it, but it is just a matter of time for us. We'd much rather pay a little to have tools work out of the gate and not have to spend my time or our staff's time trying to program something to work. That's what Adam is for. :-) Open source is a wonderful thing, but it isn't always "free". I don't know about everyone else, but my time definitely counts for something.

For some of the criticisms of Observium, I agree. We too use APC UPS, as an example, and the runtime and battery % is a must for us that is lacking at the moment. Honestly, Observium is just young at the moment and still developing, so it is A.) naive to expect Adam & team to be able to support everything out of the gate B.) expect it to be free. While I'd love to be able to switch over to 100% Observium, we can't quite yet but are anxiously waiting for Observium to catch up.

Money always talks, just like in the Kickstarter campaign, and I for one would readily support some type of bounty/mini-kickstarter for aspects people feel are missing. Using that APC example, I'd pay (or chip in some money) to have the full MIB support so we can see runtime and battery %. Of if you need a full Cisco SLA implementation, pay for it yourself and get a group of people together that need it. Of if you have something in your environment, expose it to the Observium team over VPN or https or something and let them test against it, if it is something they ulimately want to have in their product. 

Adam, keep up the good work.


Robbie Wright
Siuslaw Broadband
541-902-5101

**For support issues, please email support@siuslawbroadband.com.**


On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Andrew Hunstiger <Andrew.Hunstiger@argodata.com> wrote:
Well, I for one will be bringing this up with my manager when we start discussing budgeting for next year.  To me >$150 a year for something like this is a no-brainer.

If it becomes more expensive down the road I will probably have to justify it quite a bit more (and make them realize it is more than just a cool toy to get some stats), but if it keeps improving like it has been then I don't see that as a problem.  Between some other open source tools out there in the Linux community for monitoring your network/devices, Observium to me has the best blend of ease of use and functionality (to me).  Plus I don't need to explain templates to people when they start to use it...

--Andrew

-----Original Message-----
From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong
Sent: Monday, October 07, 2013 9:50 AM
To: Observium Network Observation System
Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

On 2013-10-07 15:42, Michael Sweikata wrote:
> Speaking as someone in the same environment:
>
> Probably because the UPS devices came around as a result of an
> immediate issue. "Power went out, blew some equipment. If we had the
> UPS system..." "Here's a check, buy ten." I run into the same issue
> all the time. Until monitoring comes about after an immediate issue,
> it's a non-priority to deal with it after the next budget cycle.
>
> Hell, I have a shit implementation of LMSPrime that we got free from
> Cisco, and I still prefer Observium, and will do everything in my
> power to convince my superiors to pay the license. Especially since
> Observium has been directly responsible for us proving that our ISPs
> weren't providing the bandwidth we were allotted, as well as
> identifying bandwidth bottlenecks, and when devices restart.

Indeed. I would hope that we provide enough information which is otherwise difficult to collect and visualize that we're not too difficult to squeeze into the "critical insurance" category of spending.

This is one of the reasons we priced the subscription so low. More than one person has suggested we are "insane" and we should be charging ten times as much. :)

adam.
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