I promised you more questions for use in my evaluation process, here comes the next one:

Odd devices: besides the 4000 routers and switches in my previous post, our business does a great deal of video transmissions. This is handled with crazy video codec boxes which sometimes have very limited SNMP capabilities. 

I face two problems:

- it cant be autodiscovered; the MIB simply doesn't that. I have a database describing exactly what we have and how it's configured.

- it's covered by NDAs, so I cant event tell you much about it.

I would like to graph various parameters in these devices using observium, but I guess I will have to implement these myself. (or hire somebody to sign the NDA and hack something together for me). Also, sometimes the concept needing graphing isn't really bound to a single device, but more a collation of multiple states from multiple devices. 

I understand that observium isn't really meant to be extensible by the end customer (me) by simply tweaking configuration. 

I read 

    "It's not as simple as "adding the MIB", 

    actual code needs to be written to support the device and its features. 

    You could learn PHP and familiarise yourself with the 

    Observium codebase and write support for it yourself." 

as a warning, as i'm nowhere a competent PHP hacker.

Think the questions are:

- is observium at all the right tool for the job? (a goal is to limit the number of tools the NOC has to learn)

- can observium live in an non-auto-discovery world?

- can observium handle abstract measurements not bound to a specific device?

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