On 2013-10-04 20:39, Frank Ortmann wrote:

Seems reasonable to me. You've got to make some money somehow and it seems to be an affordable price. Will have to see how the accountants feel about it though :-)

Will this mailing list serve both community and enterprise users?

I'm not sure yet. Where else would we put the community users? :)

adam.

I'll pay him not to be - it is quite ammusing sometimes :)

(only j/k btw)

On 5/10/2013 10:40, Mark wrote:

Is Adam going to be nicer to us when we are paying customers? :P

• Mark

...

On Oct 4, 2013, at 2:59 PM, Adam Armstrong adama@memetic.org wrote:

...

On 2013-10-04 20:39, Frank Ortmann wrote: Seems reasonable to me. You've got to make some money somehow and it seems to be an affordable price. Will have to see how the accountants feel about it though :-) Will this mailing list serve both community and enterprise users?

I'm not sure yet. Where else would we put the community users? :)

adam. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

---

observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

On 10/05/2013 11:43 AM, Paul Gear wrote:

Hi Peter,

P.S. Sorry for misspelling your name, Pieter. :-)

On 2013-10-04 22:34, Pieter De Wit wrote:

Can we subscribe twice ? 1 for a Prod box and one for a standby box ?

You don't have to subscribe twice for that, but you can if you like :>

adam.

As for me the tar.gz provided at http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz is corrupted (opened with WinRAR). Don't think it's on me, just saying.

Regards Le 06/10/2013 17:55, Adam Armstrong a écrit :

They were already on the Ubuntu/Debian guide, I've added them to the RHEL/Centos/etc guide.

I think there is some scope for merging the guides, actually...

adam.

On 2013-10-06 16:39, Jared Beaulieu wrote:

...

Does the install page need to be updated with a link to the tar file for the Open Source edition?

• Jared

---

FROM: Adam Armstrong adama@memetic.org TO: observium@observium.org SENT: Friday, October 4, 2013 11:48 AM SUBJECT: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

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 [1]

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. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium [2]

Links:

[1] http://www.observium.org/Edition_Split [2] http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

---

observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

---

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Le 07/10/2013 01:07, Sander Steffann a écrit :

Hi,

...

As for me the tar.gz provided at http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz is corrupted

Nope, the file is just fine

...

(opened with WinRAR)

That explains it then :-) Sander

---

observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

I open tar.gz every day with that software, you can dislike but can't ignore the fact that it supports (since a long time) tar.gz perfectly. It works for OpenSSL, Debian or whatever. It doesn't come frome WinRAR, like I said it's up to you to ignore feedback, I'm not trying to sell my stuff.

Kind regards,

Extracting fine here as well... must be an issue with your WinRar, check if you really downloaded the entire file... not that it just died in the middle...

Daniel Preussker

[ Security Consultant, Network & Protocol Security and Cryptography [ LPI & Novell Certified Linux Engineer and Researcher [ Daniel@Preussker.Net [ http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x87E736968E490AA1

On 07.10.2013, at 11:59, Tom Laermans wrote:

Hi,

On 10/07/2013 11:21 AM, Leslie-Alexandre DENIS wrote:

...

...

...

As for me the tar.gz provided at http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz is corrupted

I open tar.gz every day with that software, you can dislike but can't ignore the fact that it supports (since a long time) tar.gz perfectly. It works for OpenSSL, Debian or whatever. It doesn't come frome WinRAR, like I said it's up to you to ignore feedback, I'm not trying to sell my stuff.

toml@galaxy:~$ mkdir observium-latest toml@galaxy:~$ cd observium-latest toml@galaxy:~/observium-latest$ wget http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz --2013-10-07 11:57:14-- http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz Resolving www.observium.org (www.observium.org)... 144.76.63.148 Connecting to www.observium.org (www.observium.org)|144.76.63.148|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 33075854 (32M) [application/x-gzip] Saving to: `observium-community-latest.tar.gz'

100%[==========================================================================================================================================>] 33,075,854 2.84M/s in 11s

2013-10-07 11:57:26 (2.89 MB/s) - `observium-community-latest.tar.gz' saved [33075854/33075854]

toml@galaxy:~/observium-latest$ tar -zxf observium-community-latest.tar.gz toml@galaxy:~/observium-latest$ du -sh observium 225M observium

The file is just fine.

Tom _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

On 2013-10-07 11:42, Leslie-Alexandre DENIS wrote:

Try under Windows with a regular http client and decompression tool. Tell me then.

Why on earth would you need to decompress Observium with WinRAR?

It's not our fault of WinRAR doesn't support a .tar.gz created with :

adama@alpha:~$ gzip --version gzip 1.5 Copyright (C) 2007, 2010, 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc. Copyright (C) 1993 Jean-loup Gailly.

adama@alpha:~$ tar --version tar (GNU tar) 1.26 Copyright (C) 2011 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

With the command :

adama@alpha:~$ tar zcvf observium-community.tar.gz observium

Perhaps you should go and troll WinRAR, Jean-loup Gailly or the fucking Free Sofware Foundation?

Idiot.

adam.

P.S.

But hey, if this is the bullshit we get for continuing to release an Open Source version, maybe we'll stop doing that...

On 2013-10-07 12:19, Laurens Vets wrote:

PS C:\temp> (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz%22,%22c:%5Ctemp%5...") PS C:\temp>

what is this sorcery!? :O

adam.

Powershell, IT IS THE AWESOMES

On 07/10/2013 12:21, Adam Armstrong wrote:

On 2013-10-07 12:19, Laurens Vets wrote:

...

PS C:\temp> (New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadFile("http://www.observium.org/observium-community-latest.tar.gz%22,%22c:%5Ctemp%5...")

PS C:\temp>

what is this sorcery!? :O

adam. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

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

You won't be able to find any commercial enterprise monitoring product for $160/year.

I also work for a state university that runs a Cisco network. To put this in perspective, I have paid more than $160 for a small mounting bracket from Cisco.

Typically we do use a lengthy purchasing process, but when the cost is so small we have the ability to use a purchasing card.

Just my 2 cents.

Tristan

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 8:49 AM, Adam Armstrong adama@memetic.org wrote:

On 2013-10-07 15:42, Michael Sweikata wrote:

...

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.

Indeed. I would hope that we provide enough information which is otherwise difficult to collect and visualize that we're not too difficult to squeeze into the "critical insurance" category of spending.

This is one of the reasons we priced the subscription so low. More than one person has suggested we are "insane" and we should be charging ten times as much. :)

adam. ______________________________**_________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/**cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/**observiumhttp://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

Well, I for one will be bringing this up with my manager when we start discussing budgeting for next year. To me >$150 a year for something like this is a no-brainer.

If it becomes more expensive down the road I will probably have to justify it quite a bit more (and make them realize it is more than just a cool toy to get some stats), but if it keeps improving like it has been then I don't see that as a problem. Between some other open source tools out there in the Linux community for monitoring your network/devices, Observium to me has the best blend of ease of use and functionality (to me). Plus I don't need to explain templates to people when they start to use it...

--Andrew

-----Original Message----- From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong Sent: Monday, October 07, 2013 9:50 AM To: Observium Network Observation System Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

On 2013-10-07 15:42, Michael Sweikata wrote:

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.

Indeed. I would hope that we provide enough information which is otherwise difficult to collect and visualize that we're not too difficult to squeeze into the "critical insurance" category of spending.

This is one of the reasons we priced the subscription so low. More than one person has suggested we are "insane" and we should be charging ten times as much. :)

adam. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium --------------------------------------------------- Confidentiality Notice: This electronic mail transmission is confidential, may be privileged and should be read or retained only by the intended recipient. If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete it from your system.

I agree with a number of people out here. ~$160 USD/year for a monitoring solution is nothing and the thought of having to manually build chart templates in Cacti/MRTG sounds stupid. Sure, tons of people can do it, but it is just a matter of time for us. We'd much rather pay a little to have tools work out of the gate and not have to spend my time or our staff's time trying to program something to work. That's what Adam is for. :-) Open source is a wonderful thing, but it isn't always "free". I don't know about everyone else, but my time definitely counts for something.

For some of the criticisms of Observium, I agree. We too use APC UPS, as an example, and the runtime and battery % is a must for us that is lacking at the moment. Honestly, Observium is just young at the moment and still developing, so it is A.) naive to expect Adam & team to be able to support everything out of the gate B.) expect it to be free. While I'd love to be able to switch over to 100% Observium, we can't quite yet but are anxiously waiting for Observium to catch up.

Money always talks, just like in the Kickstarter campaign, and I for one would readily support some type of bounty/mini-kickstarter for aspects people feel are missing. Using that APC example, I'd pay (or chip in some money) to have the full MIB support so we can see runtime and battery %. Of if you need a full Cisco SLA implementation, pay for it yourself and get a group of people together that need it. Of if you have something in your environment, expose it to the Observium team over VPN or https or something and let them test against it, if it is something they ulimately want to have in their product.

Adam, keep up the good work.

Robbie Wright Siuslaw Broadband http://siuslawbroadband.com 541-902-5101

**For support issues, please email support@siuslawbroadband.com.**

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 8:37 AM, Andrew Hunstiger < Andrew.Hunstiger@argodata.com> wrote:

Well, I for one will be bringing this up with my manager when we start discussing budgeting for next year. To me >$150 a year for something like this is a no-brainer.

If it becomes more expensive down the road I will probably have to justify it quite a bit more (and make them realize it is more than just a cool toy to get some stats), but if it keeps improving like it has been then I don't see that as a problem. Between some other open source tools out there in the Linux community for monitoring your network/devices, Observium to me has the best blend of ease of use and functionality (to me). Plus I don't need to explain templates to people when they start to use it...

--Andrew

-----Original Message----- From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong Sent: Monday, October 07, 2013 9:50 AM To: Observium Network Observation System Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

On 2013-10-07 15:42, Michael Sweikata wrote:

...

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.

Indeed. I would hope that we provide enough information which is otherwise difficult to collect and visualize that we're not too difficult to squeeze into the "critical insurance" category of spending.

This is one of the reasons we priced the subscription so low. More than one person has suggested we are "insane" and we should be charging ten times as much. :)

adam. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium --------------------------------------------------- Confidentiality Notice: This electronic mail transmission is confidential, may be privileged and should be read or retained only by the intended recipient. If you have received this transmission in error, please immediately notify the sender and delete it from your system. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

On 2013-10-07 15:48, Eric Stewart wrote:

On Monday, October 07, 2013 10:27:56 AM, Adam Armstrong wrote: 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.

Eric Stewart - Network Administrator - eric@usf.edu University of South Florida, Information Technology

"The USF System has an annual budget of $1.5 billion and an annual economic impact of $3.7 billion."

Sure. :)

adam.

On 2013-10-07 17:25, Eric Stewart wrote:

I cannot safely comment on where that budget goes.

The football team.

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 7:27 AM, Adam Armstrong adama@memetic.org wrote:

I would ask, however, why a cheap-ass educational establishment has so many expensive UPSes, but can't pay for their monitoring software. ;)

Spoken like someone who doesn't know how university budgets work. ;)

Generally university budgets are done on a year-to-year (or biennium-to-biennium) basis. There's no guarantee money you have now will be there next year, and in fact anything you don't spend in a given budget year disappears. The result is it's often easy to get money for one-time purchases, but arranging regular payment for things like software subscriptions is nearly impossible.

As you can imagine, the recent move by places like Adobe to software-as-a-service subscription models is causing a lot of angst here.

Hey guys, Following this thread... I have a hard time believing someone can't get away with putting $160 into an expense for their IT department. Any budget I've ever seen accounts for some additional day to day expenses within a certain limit. I mean what do you do if a hard drive fails or you need more RAM for a server - go through an approval process with the board? I don't think it's the school that's being cheap...

-Colin

On 2013-10-07 21:09, David Brodbeck wrote:

On Mon, Oct 7, 2013 at 12:36 PM, Colin Anderson c.anderson@t3com.net wrote:

Hey guys,

Following this thread… I have a hard time believing someone can’t get away with putting $160 into an expense for their IT department.  Any budget I’ve ever seen accounts for some additional day to day expenses within a certain limit.  I mean what do you do if a hard drive fails or you need more RAM for a server – go through an approval process with the board?  I don’t think it’s the school that’s being cheap…

Depends on the department.  Some of them are pretty much entirely funded by grants.  Grant comes in, you get money for new hardware to support it...otherwise...you try to beg for something from some other department...

Well then, you pay for it out of your own money to make your life better, or you suffer with cacti.

adam.

Sounds to me like maybe a one-time ‘lifetime’ fee could be an option.

From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Eric Stewart Sent: Monday, October 7, 2013 16:30 To: Observium Network Observation System Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

1. Software is handled differently. It's easy to get a replacement drive or RAM if needed. It's even easy to get a one-time charge for, say, an upgrade to VMWare Fusion. A yearly software fee for something that does what a product we already have does? Hard to justify. 2. We're looking for something that's better than what we have. To be more clear, we have something that works; we're just looking for something better. What we have is free and does everything we need (but has some issues with manageability and ease of use). Observium has a lot of features we want, but lacks features we need. Since it does not yet reach "need" status for us, and doesn't cover some of our more important (though arguably esoteric) use cases, it's not something we can justify at this time. 3. We're in the testing/investigation phase and I'm looking at what it would take for Observium to be a viable replacement for our current system. This started last week, before I was aware of even the hint that there might be a change in release options. I saw a lot of promise and was surprised by many of the features ... but knowing that a "free, somewhat crappy but completely working, mostly homegrown solution" outweighs a "really nice but needs a lot of work, and possibly not free solution", the wind was taken out of my sails a bit when I read Adam's message.

Hey, if it were coming out of my pocket, I'd be all over the idea of "Well, let me pay for it for a year and see if some of what we need gets into the code, and maybe even contribute a bit to the code." Indeed, the idea of putting my own out of pocket money in for the first year hasn't quite been rejected. Also toying with the idea of using the free version for as much as we can get out of it, tacking on the one or two things that are a must have for our environment, and trying to get the code added through the methods suggested by Tom.

The split editions move is just crappy timing for me. Not blaming anyone for that, not really even complaining, that's just what it is. And I have no problem with the need to fund development, nor the method used to do so. Just doesn't look like it's going to work for my situation because the product just isn't where we would need it to be to buy in at this time.

I do dearly hope it gets there, though.

On Monday, October 07, 2013 3:36:36 PM, Colin Anderson wrote:

Hey guys,

Following this thread… I have a hard time believing someone can’t get away with putting $160 into an expense for their IT department. Any budget I’ve ever seen accounts for some additional day to day expenses within a certain limit. I mean what do you do if a hard drive fails or you need more RAM for a server – go through an approval process with the board? I don’t think it’s the school that’s being cheap…

-Colin

_______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

Spin it this way. They spend $160 per year to get software that saves you from having to develop it from scratch. Estimated time to develop: <insert ludicrous amount of time here> realistically six to twelve months of relatively uninterrupted. ROI == ((<ludicrous time> - <deployment time>) * <your hourly wage>) - $160 / $160

Any administrator should be able to understand the value in that.

From: Eric Stewart <eric@usf.edumailto:eric@usf.edu> Reply-To: Observium Network Observation System <observium@observium.orgmailto:observium@observium.org> Date: Monday, October 7, 2013 3:29 PM To: Observium Network Observation System <observium@observium.orgmailto:observium@observium.org> Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

1. Software is handled differently. It's easy to get a replacement drive or RAM if needed. It's even easy to get a one-time charge for, say, an upgrade to VMWare Fusion. A yearly software fee for something that does what a product we already have does? Hard to justify. 2. We're looking for something that's better than what we have. To be more clear, we have something that works; we're just looking for something better. What we have is free and does everything we need (but has some issues with manageability and ease of use). Observium has a lot of features we want, but lacks features we need. Since it does not yet reach "need" status for us, and doesn't cover some of our more important (though arguably esoteric) use cases, it's not something we can justify at this time. 3. We're in the testing/investigation phase and I'm looking at what it would take for Observium to be a viable replacement for our current system. This started last week, before I was aware of even the hint that there might be a change in release options. I saw a lot of promise and was surprised by many of the features ... but knowing that a "free, somewhat crappy but completely working, mostly homegrown solution" outweighs a "really nice but needs a lot of work, and possibly not free solution", the wind was taken out of my sails a bit when I read Adam's message.

Hey, if it were coming out of my pocket, I'd be all over the idea of "Well, let me pay for it for a year and see if some of what we need gets into the code, and maybe even contribute a bit to the code." Indeed, the idea of putting my own out of pocket money in for the first year hasn't quite been rejected. Also toying with the idea of using the free version for as much as we can get out of it, tacking on the one or two things that are a must have for our environment, and trying to get the code added through the methods suggested by Tom.

The split editions move is just crappy timing for me. Not blaming anyone for that, not really even complaining, that's just what it is. And I have no problem with the need to fund development, nor the method used to do so. Just doesn't look like it's going to work for my situation because the product just isn't where we would need it to be to buy in at this time.

I do dearly hope it gets there, though.

On Monday, October 07, 2013 3:36:36 PM, Colin Anderson wrote:

Hey guys,

Following this thread… I have a hard time believing someone can’t get away with putting $160 into an expense for their IT department. Any budget I’ve ever seen accounts for some additional day to day expenses within a certain limit. I mean what do you do if a hard drive fails or you need more RAM for a server – go through an approval process with the board? I don’t think it’s the school that’s being cheap…

-Colin

_______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.orgmailto:observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

-- Eric Stewart - Network Administrator - eric@usf.edumailto:eric@usf.edu University of South Florida, Information Technology

Hi there,

First of all, thanks for the support :-)

I don't think anyone really feels (I wouldn't know how) that £100 yearly is a lot of money - rather that their company/school/whatever is set up in a discouraging way which prefers to spend, indeed, 25000 or more $currency on the same product, or does not have a credit card (wut?), or has an insane expense policy. However if they feel they want Observium enough, I'm sure they'll find a way to pay for it. Be it out of their own pocket, by stealing the CEO's lunch as a payback, or simply by poking their accounting departments enough until they budge.

I'll gladly help any of those out with a larger invoice and a bank account number though ;-)

Tom

On 10/08/2013 05:29 PM, Lane Eckley wrote:

A lot of your guys are just plain ridiculous!

How some of you have the tenacity to debate the idea of Observium wanting to charge a $165/Year ($13.75/Month) is .... Complete loss of words.

Have you ever looked around to see what everyone else is charging for their monitoring systems? It ranges anywhere from $2/Month per device to systems like Nimsoft that can cost is excess of $50/Month per device. It is nowhere near uncommon for companies to shell out a quarter million dollars to purchase a monitoring system and you guys are clammering over $165 bucks, get real.

For you who are working for non-profits & education system you could skip lunch once a month and purchase Obvserium to make your job easier. I realize that not everyone thinks that spending money on their job is logical, but in today's world when budgets are tight you have to decide which is more important, no job at all or spending a few bucks to make your job easier (even impress your boss once in a while).

Once the new alerting system is finished up Observium will be on par with many other monitoring systems out there and all for $0.165 per device per year...it's a steal.

/end rant

*From:*observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] *On Behalf Of *Tim Schuh *Sent:* Tuesday, October 8, 2013 10:38 AM *To:* Observium Network Observation System *Subject:* Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

Spin it this way. They spend $160 per year to get software that saves you from having to develop it from scratch.

Estimated time to develop: <insert ludicrous amount of time here> realistically six to twelve months of relatively uninterrupted.

ROI == ((<ludicrous time> - <deployment time>) * <your hourly wage>) - $160 / $160

Any administrator should be able to understand the value in that.

*From: *Eric Stewart <eric@usf.edu mailto:eric@usf.edu> *Reply-To: *Observium Network Observation System <observium@observium.org mailto:observium@observium.org> *Date: *Monday, October 7, 2013 3:29 PM *To: *Observium Network Observation System <observium@observium.org mailto:observium@observium.org> *Subject: *Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

1. Software is handled differently. It's easy to get a replacement drive or RAM if needed. It's even easy to get a one-time charge for, say, an upgrade to VMWare Fusion. A yearly software fee for something that does what a product we already have does? Hard to justify.
2. We're looking for something that's better than what we have. To be more clear, we have something that works; we're just looking for something better. What we have is free and does everything we need (but has some issues with manageability and ease of use). Observium has a lot of features we want, but lacks features we need. Since it does not yet reach "need" status for us, and doesn't cover some of our more important (though arguably esoteric) use cases, it's not something we can justify at this time.
3. We're in the testing/investigation phase and I'm looking at what it would take for Observium to be a viable replacement for our current system. This started last week, before I was aware of even the hint that there might be a change in release options. I saw a lot of promise and was surprised by many of the features ... but knowing that a "free, somewhat crappy but completely working, mostly homegrown solution" outweighs a "really nice but needs a lot of work, and possibly not free solution", the wind was taken out of my sails a bit when I read Adam's message.

Hey, if it were coming out of my pocket, I'd be all over the idea of "Well, let me pay for it for a year and see if some of what we need gets into the code, and maybe even contribute a bit to the code." Indeed, the idea of putting my own out of pocket money in for the first year hasn't quite been rejected. Also toying with the idea of using the free version for as much as we can get out of it, tacking on the one or two things that are a must have for our environment, and trying to get the code added through the methods suggested by Tom.

The split editions move is just crappy timing for me. Not blaming anyone for that, not really even complaining, that's just what it is. And I have no problem with the need to fund development, nor the method used to do so. Just doesn't look like it's going to work for my situation because the product just isn't where we would need it to be to buy in at this time.

I do dearly hope it gets there, though.

On Monday, October 07, 2013 3:36:36 PM, Colin Anderson wrote:

Hey guys,

Following this thread... I have a hard time believing someone
can't get
away with putting $160 into an expense for their IT department. Any
budget I've ever seen accounts for some additional day to day
expenses
within a certain limit. I mean what do you do if a hard drive fails
or you need more RAM for a server -- go through an approval process
with the board? I don't think it's the school that's being cheap...

-Colin



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Eric Stewart - Network Administrator -eric@usf.edu  <mailto:eric@usf.edu>

University of South Florida, Information Technology

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Hi,

We've already offered a free license to a not-for-profit educational organization which does have a legitimately limited budget, so it's not like we're just trying to get the cash. I just don't think it's fair to the people who have paid, to give freebies to organizations with a larger budget than the most cities.

If we get enough supporters, I'd like to *lower* the price. That won't happen if we fall in to the corporate welfare trap.

Maybe the educational institutions can deliver code instead of money? Maybe you should put up a list of to-do items somewhere, and offer one year free usage of the professional version for completing a to-do item :-) If a to-do item takes a few day to complete then the time spent on it will be worth more than £100 in wages, so it won't be a cheap option, but it might be easier to do for some than getting budget. And it will increase the value of Observium for everyone :-)

Cheers, Sander

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:50 AM, Adam Armstrong adama@memetic.org wrote:

We all know that if there's any sector on the planet which is not short of cash, it's the US EDU sector.

Really?

I have no problem with Observium charging, but I have to take issue with you there. Where I work state funding per student has been cut to about a third of what it was 10 years ago. During the most recent recession it's been particularly bad; when tax revenues are down, higher ed is the easiest place to cut. A lot of folks have been let go, and none of us have seen a raise in five years. I'm not sure where you get the idea that it rains cash in the EDU sector, but it's just not so.

Perhaps people read stuff like this and think it extends to all in the sector:

http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-1008-banks-education-ipads-20131008,0,282...

Clearly it does not, but there is a lot of highly publicized waste out there in some parts of the system.

Regards, Mark

On 10/8/2013 1:02 PM, Fletcher Haynes wrote:

Yes, where is this mysterious rain of cash showering on the US EDU sector? We'd like to collect some.

Like David, I don't know why you would think the edu sector is awash in money, public sector in particular.

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 12:52 PM, David Brodbeck <brodbd@uw.edu mailto:brodbd@uw.edu> wrote:

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 8:50 AM, Adam Armstrong <adama@memetic.org
<mailto:adama@memetic.org>> wrote:

    We all know that if there's any sector on the planet which is not short of cash,
    it's the US EDU sector.


Really?

I have no problem with Observium charging, but I have to take issue with you there.
 Where I work state funding per student has been cut to about a third of what it was
10 years ago.  During the most recent recession it's been particularly bad; when tax
revenues are down, higher ed is the easiest place to cut.  A lot of folks have been
let go, and none of us have seen a raise in five years.  I'm not sure where you get
the idea that it rains cash in the EDU sector, but it's just not so.


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-- Fletcher Haynes <fhaynes@willamette.edu mailto:fhaynes@willamette.edu> Systems Administrator/Network Services Consultant Willamette Integrated Technology Services Willamette University, Salem, OR Phone: 503.370.6016 This message has been scanned by CanIt-PRO.

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Adam/Tom,

I'm just a small user myself and only monitor a few devices/machines. Regardless the small outlay to get a piece of software, which by the way, when I found it has made my life easier to manage my stuff when I'm away is great. If people/massive organisations can't afford $160 US per year then don't use it, keep with the free version and stop bitching. I love reading these email list's adam, keep up the good work and you'll see my money shortly

-----Original Message----- From: observium [mailto:observium-bounces@observium.org] On Behalf Of Adam Armstrong Sent: Wednesday, 9 October 2013 2:50 AM To: Observium Network Observation System Subject: Re: [Observium] Observium Community / Professional

On 2013-10-08 16:35, Tom Laermans wrote:

Hi there,

First of all, thanks for the support :-)

I don't think anyone really feels (I wouldn't know how) that £100 yearly is a lot of money - rather that their company/school/whatever is set up in a discouraging way which prefers to spend, indeed, 25000 or more $currency on the same product, or does not have a credit card (wut?), or has an insane expense policy. However if they feel they want Observium enough, I'm sure they'll find a way to pay for it. Be it out of their own pocket, by stealing the CEO's lunch as a payback, or simply by poking their accounting departments enough until they budge.

I'll gladly help any of those out with a larger invoice and a bank account number though ;-)

Personally, I think it's just people playing up to an image and wanting to seem hard done by. It just seems to me like an awful lot of nonsense from a sector which is used to getting an 80% discount from Microsoft et al on huge orders.

We all know that if there's any sector on the planet which is not short of cash, it's the US EDU sector.

There are a lot of people here who have paid, a lot of people who I suspect work at companies with a turnover measured in hundreds of thousands of euros. I think it's absurd that an organisation with a budget of $1.5 billion can possibly claim to be hard done by.

We've already offered a free license to a not-for-profit educational organization which does have a legitimately limited budget, so it's not like we're just trying to get the cash. I just don't think it's fair to the people who have paid, to give freebies to organizations with a larger budget than the most cities.

If we get enough supporters, I'd like to *lower* the price. That won't happen if we fall in to the corporate welfare trap.

adam. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

On 2013-10-09 07:43, Gerwin Krist wrote:

Hi,

IMHO when you use billing you earn money, so I understand why it's in the commercial version :-) Anyways how big is the "money" issue? I only see a small amount of people complaining about the price.

I'm not sure. We priced it on purpose low enough that realistically no one could complain that it was expensive without looking like a dick.

But still, they do... :)

adam.

I really hope no one was thinking I was complaining about the price. I know for certain at least once I've stated that I have no problem with the version split and understand the need for funding when it comes to development.

For what Observium does, it's cheaply priced. I'm happy to admit that. I've even suggested on this list that I might buy it for a year out of my own pocket.

If you want to say I was complaining about anything, say I complained about a lack of certain (possibly limited to my environment) features when compared to a different product I'm already using for free (admittedly largely homegrown) and the concern that if I wanted to contribute code to add those features, it might be all for naught since I'd be working off of dated source.

I can't justify asking the university to pay for it *at this time* because it doesn't do some key things (and I've discussed those with Tom) that the system I have in place does.

However, it is still such a strong product, and does things we could make use of, that we're still looking at it as something we could develop into something that could replace our current system. It's probably what we'd go with if we didn't already have something in place.

I stumbled across Observium and installed a test system less than a week before finding out that it was going to have a pay version. I wasn't even aware that you had done a kickstarter. I'm simply bummed by the timing.

On 10/9/2013 6:29 AM, Adam Armstrong wrote:

On 2013-10-09 07:43, Gerwin Krist wrote:

...

Hi,

IMHO when you use billing you earn money, so I understand why it's in the commercial version :-) Anyways how big is the "money" issue? I only see a small amount of people complaining about the price.

I'm not sure. We priced it on purpose low enough that realistically no one could complain that it was expensive without looking like a dick.

But still, they do... :)

adam. _______________________________________________ observium mailing list observium@observium.org http://postman.memetic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/observium

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? :)

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-- Eric Stewart - Network Administrator -eric@usf.edu University of South Florida, Information Technology

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