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.
-----Original Message----- From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong Sent: Monday, October 7, 2013 10:28 AM To: Observium Network Observation System Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional
On 2013-10-07 15:02, 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?
This is one of the things that kept us from splitting the project for so long.
We're probably not going to accept patches generated from the community edition because it's quite painful to merge things with such a large disconnect in time.
I would ask, however, why a cheap-ass educational establishment has so many expensive UPSes, but can't pay for their monitoring software. ;)
adam.
_______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium