[BBLISA] Monitoring survey

[John Stoffel]

One of the things that people seem to miss, or overlook in my opinion
is the cost of doing all this monitoring, and the steep learning curve
you have for all of it.  It's going to suck in a bunch of time at
first, way more than people think, and getting it tuned so that it's
not sending out false alarms is a huge task.

I've played with Nagios, and we have Solarwinds at $WORK, but neither
is well done or really used outside of silos.  I also played around
with collectd and graphite, but found it too simplistic in terms of
access control for what I/we wanted.  And we have an old instance of
WhatsUp running as well for another group.  It's all hodge podge.  We
really should dedicate someone to doing this work, but we all keep
getting pulled in new directions all the time.

It might be easier if you're just upgrading from something and you
know what you want to monitor, etc.  But it's not a simple drop-in
tool like some people make out.  It requires commitment and discipline
to use effectively.

John