how do you define your schema? how long does it take to insert/index/whatnot the data?
This is a much bigger deal than most people realize. Poor schema design will cause your system to choke bade when you try to scale it. In fact, relational databases are not the ideal way to store this kind of data so when you design your schema, you are really fighting against the database to wrestle it into something that will work.
this is a huge burden to figure it all out, implement and then monitor/operate 24x7. miss enough samples or data and you end up billing too little. this is why most folks have either cooked their own, or use some expensive suite of tools, leaving just a little bit of other stuff out there.
Personally, I doubt that it is possible to build a workable system, even with plugins, that will do the job for a significant percentage of service providers. Different companies have different needs, different hot button items, etc. This is an area where breaking the problem down into well-defined separate problems with a well-defined linkage, will go a long way. But to start with, just solving the data storage problem is a good place to start. If someone can create a specialized network monitoring database that scales, then the rest of the toolkit will be much easier to deal with. Note that people have done a lot of research on this sort of time-series database. People working in high-energy physics also have to deal with massive sets of time-series data. There is plenty of literature out there to help guide a design effort. But Open-Source developers don't usually do this kind of up-front research before starting coding. Money and manpower won't solve that kind of problem. --Michael Dillon