On 10/7/2013 10:43 AM, Tom Laermans wrote:

Hi Eric,

First things first: an educational institution that uses Cisco SLA and has expensive UPSes not having £100/yr for a working monitoring solution? You've got to be kidding me.

Problem is, we have a working monitoring solution. Arguably, a working monitoring solution that provides us with more data than I would expect Observium ever to do. Since we have something that works well enough (and in some ways, actually works better), and is free, I doubt seriously I can convince anyone to pony up money for a new product.

But, if you feel like you need to patch certain things, and you would like to submit patches to our bug tracker, I'll gladly take (a look at) them; depending on how much has changed versus the "dated" code, it could still go rather well.

I may take you up on that. I still consider our implementation in test phase, and the one thing I need to figure out most is probably the one thing no one else is interested in helping with: the multi-instance/distributed polling thing. But also knowing that we do things a little differently (for decent enough reasons), I'm okay with that.

The battery percentage remaining isn't so much an issue of not getting it out of the UPS, but rather that we don't have the same "infrastructure" in Observium for such things, as we have for generic sensors (which are all the other things that ARE being monitored on your UPS); same for UPS load, run time remaining, etc. Will get to it soon, I would really like to see this in Observium sooner rather than later.

I have APC, MGE and UPS-MIB UPSes to test against.

The Lieberts worked perfectly fine with UPS-MIB; I just haven't gotten around to adding them to see what they look like on my test server.

Regarding SLA, I'm sure lots more can be fleshed out, this was contributed but none of the developers use this, or have devices supporting it. Suggestions welcome... :)

If I decide to proceed with Observium in some way, and I get to this issue on my list, you'll be seeing ... something ... from me, I would guess.

Tom

On 10/07/2013 04:02 PM, Eric Stewart wrote:
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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Eric Stewart - Network Administrator - eric@usf.edu
University of South Florida, Information Technology
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Eric Stewart - Network Administrator - eric@usf.edu
University of South Florida, Information Technology