[user5994461]

All vendors provide discount if you negotiate. ;)

$15 * 500 hosts = $7500 per month.

If you think it's expensive, I can only advise you to check how much the hardware will costs on EC2 to run the free tools, plus how much work it will take to get the 8 different and independent OSS tools to work not only alone but integrate together, plus how much additional work and maintenance to keep it working without hiccups (war story: there is nothing worse than a monitoring tool that is less reliable than the thing it monitors).

[jmedefind]

Oh I agree. That's why we ditched ec2 for our own bare metal cloud based on joyent and saved over $200k/year

[chetanahuja]

> $15 * 500 hosts = $7500 per month.

Oh that's ridiculous pricing. Any team running a server installation at any sort of scale would scoff at the pricing, and that's even before you take into account the implications of sending so much of your metrics data to a third party to be held hostage there if you decide to leave the service.