Being an administrator for a cheap-ass educational institution, I really don't have issues with the Edition Split. We're unlikely to contribute money, but I understand the need for a solid revenue stream.
Except, as I am an administrator for a cheap-ass educational institution, I have a tendency to tinker, and I even have a student assistant whose job is to aid with project implementation, including development support (he's been quite active with NetDB in the past). Our existing MRTG implementation is customized with a lot of shoe-horned in graphs that I don't ever expect to see in Observium (so, there will always be MRTG for some things here), but Observium does do a lot of things our homegrown system doesn't do, and has a much more appetizing interface. However, there are things that Observium is doing that could be better, and I was thinking of putting in the time (or my student's time) to contribute changes that implement these features. For example:
- I've added an APC UPS but have noted that battery percentage remaining/runtime remaining don't exist at this time (I can understand how much of a headache this is, especially with the APC's using "timeticks" instead of a raw number of minutes or seconds). I've seen comments that this needs to be addressed, and I'd be willing to put the time in to address it.
- We have additional UPS models (e.g. Leibert) that may or may not be properly supported yet.
- I was happy to see Cisco SLA stuff implemented, but it's not implemented to the depth that we'd like it to be (e.g., jitter's great, but we'd also like to see packet loss stats, latency, better support for video stats, etc).
- Since we do our stats collection at the distribution layer (8-9 servers across campus, remote sites/campuses, and a remote data center), I'm still trying to think of a good way to search/navigate between them (particularly since it's not always clear which building is out of which node) without adding too much complexity.
Would it be useful to the community for me to work on the community tar.gz version and submit them? Or would trying to add new code that was developed against potentially dated code be too much of a headache for the main developers?
On 10/4/2013 2:48 PM, Adam Armstrong wrote:
Hi Guys,
As we talked about in April, to sustain development we need to develop a revenue stream.
The temporary solution in April was the Kickstarter, which funded 6 months of development for the alerting system. To fund development after that, we've decided to try a relatively inexpensive subscription scheme.
http://www.observium.org/Edition_Split
The intention is to provide enough for free to keep the people who wouldn't ever pay happy, and try to keep the price low enough that everyone else can pay without worrying too much about it.
We've set the subscription at £100/year. If you were a Kickstarter supporter, you'll get a free subscription for a while, because we're nice like that.
Comments? :)
adam.
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