Sunday, November 25, 2018

Sunday review of Monitoring and configuration management software

So...

We currently use Solarwinds NCM / NPM to look after our Cisco estate. 100+ ISRG2 devices.

I'm thinking of changing because

- I screwed up when buying it, I thought it was priced per node. but it's not, it's per interface. So to cover what I need to cover (now), I need a larger licence.

- A larger licence also means forking out for all of the lapsed maintenance payments. ouch.

- I have to host it (using AWS), so I've got the ongoing cost of that. Plus backing it up etc. It's hassle that I could happily do without.

As an MSP, I'm keen on a pay-as-you-go SaaS arrangement rather than what we've got above.

Functionality I want

- Monitoring of WAN interfaces at customer sites

- Cisco Configuration management / backup

- An API we can access to pull in stuff for our reporting

- Support

Functionality I'm not fussed about

- being able to monitor internal devices (switches etc) as NCentral will already do that for us.

- Monitoring servers - also NCentral

Before Solarwinds, we used to use Nagios. But it needed too much skill for our support team to be able to easily add items. I also upgraded the underlying Unix install and...errr... broke everything...

Maybe Nagios XI / Zabbix are different now, but it's an experience I wouldn't want to repeat.

What are other people using? what would your choice be? Are there vendors / products that I might have completely missed?

Short list at the moment

PRTG

DataDog

Auvik

Nemo (maybe)



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