At no point has anyone said that it is not permissible to ask “can I do x, y and z with the alerting?”. The big thing isn’t alerting though (there’s probably fifty different ways to do “alerting” without buying
Observium), it’s the rolling updates and fixes (and traffic accounting doesn’t hurt).
Somewhere some faith is required that if it’s in the documentation or a project member says that it works a certain way that it does, in fact, work that certain way.
This topic has been done to death, but:
It’s only (yes, only) £150. I appreciate if you’re a student, or a charity, every penny counts, but it’s not a lot of money for supporting a pretty comprehensive project, and in the nicest possible terms if Observium
WITHOUT alerting and billing isn’t worth £12.50 a month to you... I don’t think there’s any use in me trying to help your value judgement. Think about what your time is worth to you, if not your employer. It personally saves me £12.50 a month in time in not
having to dick around in Cacti.
There are very few corner cases I can think of (okay, none) where alerting is a must have but money is so tight you can’t take other people’s word for it that a £150 subscription product will send an email when
“utilisation > 80%”, or whatever. Spending time trying to make a trial work (and we’ve all been there at one point or another) instead of documenting your need and just asking “can I do these tests?” should not make you or your employer happy.
If you want trials and all the inflexibility that ultimately entails, solarwinds et al are your best bet. Re-mortgage your house first though, cos you’re gonna need that money when you’ve spent hours getting
it configured how you like and then you decide to buy.
Observium (like most sane products) is not really trying to be all things to everyone. That includes the business model on which it is based, but £150 is at least extremely accessible, and the community edition
functionality/design should give you a good enough feel as to whether it’s worth £150/yr to support the project and get shiny things into the bargain.
From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org]
On Behalf Of Anders Johansson
Sent: 05 June 2015 12:19
To: Observium Network Observation System
Subject: Re: [Observium] Demo
I fully agree,
But there are different features available in the subscription-based release and the open source release and that’s the alert function.
For most monitoring systems the alert function is the most vital one, to be able to trigger alerts that are not false-positive and therefore can help NOC or on-call personnel to quickly deal with issues.
That part is not included and would require a purchase
J
From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org]
On Behalf Of Phillip Baker
Sent: Friday, June 5, 2015 1:19 AM
To: Observium Network Observation System
Subject: Re: [Observium] Demo
Bad news on both counts:
There are no trials of the pro edition available available (the community edition gives you enough of an idea if it will “work” in principle, and a pro licence is not really a big-ticket
purchase, there is no sensible way to do trials of a product that is provided open source) and No: it is the observium team’s not-unreasonable belief that you should have DNS on your management network to map device hostnames to and from.
If you really don’t want to do DNS, you’ll have to edit /etc/hosts on your observium server to add entries for the devices you want to monitor, and then add those.
Phil
From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org]
On Behalf Of Remy Lambert
Sent: 04 June 2015 23:38
To: observium@observium.org
Subject: [Observium] Demo
Is it possible to have a complete trial of the subscription version ?
Also, I would like to know if observium can be configure so I can just put an IP address when adding a device instead of a hostname?
Thanks in advance!
Rémy Lambert
Administrateur réseau
Département informatique
(819) 523-2765 poste 3313
Gestion Rémabec Inc.
1053, Boul. Ducharmes
La Tuque (Québec) G9X 3C3
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