This is a great free tool, just don't ask for something the developer doesn't agree with. He and the IRC community supporting it will tear you to shreds.
The thing about Observium is the feature set happens to select for a unusual number of unskilled+entitled+whiny users.
Observium's niche is user-friendly software for comprehensive monitoring of networks (and some server/appliance things). Setup is as easy as Wordpress and it will monitor pretty much everything on a network (ISP/carrier). Adding a device is pretty much one click, add hostname.
In exchange it expects things like having resolvable hostnames for devices and standardized port descriptions.
Compare this with Nagios or Cacti where you have to configure checks/graph collection for each thing you care about. The skill level required to set them up is a bit higher than Observium but still free.
Alternatively you have commercial software like Orion or Intermapper where setup may be easier but you have to pay for every metric you collect.
Because of this Observium gets a stream of vocal small MSP/ISP-type people who demand support and aren't willing to pay for it. I believe Obserivum went to a pay-for-access model in part to keep this under control.
I use Observium, pay for the subscription (~$200/yr is really trivial for this), and have contributed patches (that were committed) that fixed bugs and added device support (without any compensation aside from it making $DAYJOB easier). From the WISP community alone I saw probably half a year of "I won't buy a subscription until you support X device/X pet feature" from people who often came off as the client from hell in how they said it.
So, yeah, I don't like that I end up with a bit of anxiety over the reception my patches will get but I see the occasionally rough reaction as a immune response from a community that's under stress.
I agree with this, the developer on this is no doubt good at what he does, but him and the community that supports him is very poisonous. Does not take criticism well, and is generally hateful to people who say something he doesn't agree with.
Do you have any examples? I am not teasing here with you. Seriously I'd like to know what they do since I'm still looking for monitoring solution (currently testing munin).
On their site they say you only have the "Ability to suggest new features" if you pay £150/year to obtain the Professional edition. Maybe their opinion changes if you throw money at them.
> The Observium Community Edition only receives critical security updates between 6-monthly release cycles and it is intended for small non-critical deployments, home use, evaluation or lab environments.
Give LibreNMS a try (www.librenms.org), it's a fork of Observium but with different values.
I do agree with dozzie though and that's something LibreNMS hasn't yet resolved which is being able to correlate data from different devices / systems to give you the one true answer of what's just gone wrong. I'd like to think we could get closer to being able to do that with more people contributing + some fundamental changes to the software.
Observium's niche is user-friendly software for comprehensive monitoring of networks (and some server/appliance things). Setup is as easy as Wordpress and it will monitor pretty much everything on a network (ISP/carrier). Adding a device is pretty much one click, add hostname.
In exchange it expects things like having resolvable hostnames for devices and standardized port descriptions.
Compare this with Nagios or Cacti where you have to configure checks/graph collection for each thing you care about. The skill level required to set them up is a bit higher than Observium but still free.
Alternatively you have commercial software like Orion or Intermapper where setup may be easier but you have to pay for every metric you collect.
Because of this Observium gets a stream of vocal small MSP/ISP-type people who demand support and aren't willing to pay for it. I believe Obserivum went to a pay-for-access model in part to keep this under control.
I use Observium, pay for the subscription (~$200/yr is really trivial for this), and have contributed patches (that were committed) that fixed bugs and added device support (without any compensation aside from it making $DAYJOB easier). From the WISP community alone I saw probably half a year of "I won't buy a subscription until you support X device/X pet feature" from people who often came off as the client from hell in how they said it.
So, yeah, I don't like that I end up with a bit of anxiety over the reception my patches will get but I see the occasionally rough reaction as a immune response from a community that's under stress.