I come from the education sector and as some of you know, there has been an influx of CARES money that’s been doled out by the govt. With that said, there’s been a rush of much needed infrastructure spending going on. After a decade or so we’re finally upgrading our access layer switching to Aruba.
Our previous NMS is omnivista (Alcatel). Honestly it’s been going great! Super stable and despite the age, just keeps chugging along.
I understand that I’ll need to upgrade from it eventually but a bit reluctant to go with the obvious choice of using Central. For one, the licenses, which looks like it’s 1 per device (wireless and wired). I guess they’ve moved on from a permanent license to a $ubscription model. We still have those permanent licenses from our wireless APs (we use airwave 8) and from what I understand they’d have to be changed.
This is what got me looking into LibreNMS. I’ve seen some posts on it before and I’m impressed. I’ve even installed it just to see how it looks like. I want to propose this as an alternative but I’d like to get the opinion of people who have used it for a while. Even better if you’ve moved on from central. Are there features in Central that are “can’t miss” ones? Any lingering issues with Libre?
The scope of the nms is mostly the wired side of things. I’m sure central has a lot of bells and whistles but I don’t know if it can justify the cost of licenses annually. On top of that We’ll likely have another monitoring tool like SolarWinds put back in anyway (I don’t have a say on that one) so to me it’s a bit of overkill to have/pay for all this. My biggest fear is we’ll have all this tech but no time to implement/use them. This has happened before because we simply don’t have enough bandwidth to do all the work.
Tl;dr - will librenms be enough for an enterprise nms solution for an Aruba shop? Or should I go with Aruba central and get all the bells and whistles it offers?
No comments:
Post a Comment