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