[177601] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Alerting systems, Logicmonitor and/or alternatives
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mel Beckman)
Wed Jan 28 13:42:28 2015
X-Original-To: nanog@nanog.org
From: Mel Beckman <mel@beckman.org>
To: Jay Hennigan <jay@west.net>
Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2015 18:40:19 +0000
In-Reply-To: <54C92522.7060301@west.net>
Cc: "<nanog@nanog.org>" <nanog@nanog.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
The value proposition of all cloud services is that you get instant technic=
al capability without building your own infrastructure. I see cloud NMS ser=
vices like LogicMonitor and Spiceworks as a good deal for small organizatio=
ns without their own IT people. But for all the reasons you give, the model=
doesn't scale very well.
For network professionals, the value of self-managed internal monitoring in=
frastructure far outweighs the temporary ease and low cost of cloud monitor=
ing. In particular, commercial monitoring offerings, such as Intermapper, P=
RTG, and SolarWinds, are extremely cost effective for business network oper=
ations. Their cost is easily justifiable, especially if you have a busy sta=
ff. Yes, you can get many of the commercial tool capabilities in open sourc=
e projects such as OpenNMS and Cacti. But as you note, they can be a pain t=
o configure, and if your labor is worth anything, the commercial options ar=
e usually a better deal.
One exception I've found recently is Mikrotik's The Dude, which is free, bu=
t not FOSS. It's fully graphical, is straightforward to install and configu=
re. It has a client/server architecture like Intermapper, but doesn't run n=
atively on as many platforms (Windows only; other OSes must use emulation).=
Although it works with any SNMP device, it has special support for Mikroti=
k, since Mikrotik devised it.
To recap, I think cloud monitoring is pointless for managing inside network=
s for any organization having a reasonably capable IT staff.=20
On Jan 28, 2015, at 10:06 AM, Jay Hennigan <jay@west.net>
wrote:
> I know that this topic has been kicking around for at least a decade,
> but wanted to get current opinions of other network operators. Most of
> us have explored Nagios, MRTG, and several front-ends for MRTG.
>=20
> We are looking into a new player in the space called Logicmonitor. They
> have a very functional and easy to navigate front end and configuration
> tool, and I very much like the look-and-feel of their product.
>=20
> What I don't like is that they only offer it as a cloud-based service.
> Internal probes tie in to a "collector" which we maintain. The collector
> then phones home over the Internet to their hosted service periodically
> and they remotely analyze the data and generate alerts, plot graphs, etc.
>=20
> From a technical standpoint this adds more points of failure in series,
> will cause missed alerts if their cloud-based service goes down (who is
> guarding the guards?) will cause false alarms if their service is still
> up but can't reach the collector, and doesn't give us a full view under
> the hood.
>=20
> Of course their sales guys are giving us "Our time and energy is
> dedicated to reliability" and "professionally managed multi-carrier
> highly secure data centers" language to encourage the warm fuzzies.
>=20
> From a scalability standpoint we incur ever-increasing recurring costs
> as we grow and add monitored devices and services.
>=20
> What's the collective opinion here? Is anyone using them or a similar
> service? Are there non-cloud-based alternatives that are relatively easy
> to set up and manage? We've explored Zabbix, Nagios, MRTG and its
> various wrappers, and Intermapper. Anything else new on the horizon that
> has a GUI front-end that is configurable without a lot of scripting
> experience, etc.?
>=20
> We would love to buy something that works for us and pay a reasonable
> price for it, but I'm not particularly interested in the equivalent of
> renting a time-share in order to monitor our networks.
>=20
>=20
> --
> Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - jay@impulse.net
> Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/
> Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
