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).
-- 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
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