Re: Alerting systems, Logicmonitor and/or alternatives

[charles () thefnf org]

> 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.?

Zenoss. I have it monitoring about 4k end points. The documentation is 
phenomnal. I've not had to touch the command line at all for any 
operations. I have two cron jobs on the server (one to do a weekly 
backup to a tar file that gets grabbed by my backup systems, one to run 
zendisc on only subnets I care about (and not everything in zenoss which 
is the default). The learning curve was pretty much non existent (you 
install it (which is apt-get or yum or scripted [i think appliances 
exist, i dunno]) , connect with default creds, change your creds, scan 
your network, classify devices, setup alerting rules and contacts). This 
all presumes you have SNMP already setup of course (which is trivial to 
do on just about everything). (Oh I did use the CLI to load in mibs, but 
that's a one time operation (unless you are constantly adding new 
vendors to your network i guess).

> 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.

Indeed. You should be able to find plenty of Linux engineers that could 
easily set this up. I would probably charge about $250.00 to $500.00 
flat rate for a zenoss deployment, and could deliver it in 8 to 30 hours 
fully ready to go (range depends on size of deployment, HA, multi site 
etc). I expect most other engineers could do about the same (or maybe a 
bit longer if they've never worked with Zenoss before).

(I'm that weird Linux/Windows/VM/storage/security/app admin type who is 
now getting his CCIE cause networking looks fun).

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