In a recently published white paper, Monitis is trying to prove that their cloud-based monitoring solution is far superior to “Open Source Monitoring Software”.

What are the arguments that should make you discard any Open Source based monitoring solution ?

• robust notifications and alerts
• quick and easy to setup
• low cost of entry and TCO
• monitoring from outside the internal network
• easily scalable
• green
• cool

So, what do these bullets have to do Open Source versus proprietary exactly ? absolutely nothing.

This whitepaper proves that there may be better and more cost-effective options than hosting your own monitoring infrastructure yourself. Well, news at ten ! Wow ! this is absolutely fantastic !

Any seasoned sysadmin should know that a switch can fry or a mail server can go down, letting your monitoring infrastructure without any mean to probe for services health and alert you. That’s part of monitoring 101 !

This is not a “OSS or proprietary”, “OSS or hosted”, “OSS or whatever” decision, this is a design decision. They are comparing setting up a full-blown monitoring infrastructure (probes, queues, passive/active, agents, etc …) against editing probes and alerts in an existing platform. Theirs, more exactly.

Robust notifications and alerts ? Can I be notified via jabber (or yammer) when using monitis ? no. Available notification options are e-mail and/or text messages. My monitoring infrastructure sends alerts using e-mails, jabber and private yams. Can i do that with monitis ? no. I wrote the alert scripts myself. Can i do that with monitis ? no.  Argument dismissed.

Quick and easy to setup ? I’m pretty sure the platform that monitis use for their service is not  easy to setup. That’s part of why they provide a pretty good product, that’s the barrier to entry in their business. They sell a service that’s easy to setup. I would expect no less. Now, is adding monitoring for new hosts and services difficult in my current monitoring platform ? not at all. Once i have passed the initial setup phase, which is, admitedly, quite a steep slope to climb, i can add services and hosts in a breeze. My platform runs on a similar cloud infrastructure that they are selling as a green and cool tech. I even add the hosts automatically to the monitoring infrastructure when the instances are launched. I have started writing software that would monitor a specific metric (not a TCP port availability or a server’s transmit time, a business-related metric) that would start instances when needed. Can i do that with the monitis platform ? no. My platform is as “quick and easy” to setup.

Low cost of entry and TCO ? Admitedly, if you want to be serious about monitoring, you need dedicated hardware. In the white paper, the arguments against setting up your own platform are the cost of the hardware, and the decently competent people required to operate it :

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> For open-source tools, however, the tab for monitoring is high. Consider
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> these costs:
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> * $2,000 + for a server
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> * $2,000 + for a backup server and storage
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> * $1,000  yearly per server for electricity
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> * Setup and maintenance labor cost (usually a dedicated or a part time resource – at least $30,000 per year) to do such things as:

> * Add plug-ins
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> * Backup data
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> * Fix issues, patching
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> * Update software
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> * Setup monitoring and alerting
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Where is the connection with Open Source Software ? They are assuming operating costs for their customers, mutualizing them, thus making sure that they can collect significant margins. Nice, but if i change “Open Source” to “proprietary”, the arguments stands. Even more, actually. I know a lot of proprietary monitoring solutions that require much more hardware and administration than any “Open Source” (thinking HP OpenView, CA Unicenter, …)

Monitoring from outside ? Having an external monitor is good practice and a proper design decision. Again, what does it has to do with “Open Source” ? Nothing in the “Open Source” solution they are trying to debunk prevents you from setting up an external monitoring system. The software even has built-in support for that. And does monitis allow me to monitor some services inside my infrastructure without exposing them ? if their platform is hosted on the cloud, they must be using multiple different IP addresses for running their probes. How do i set up my border routers ? Do I even want to do that ?! No, I don’t :-) The proper monitoring architecture must include both external and internal servers that will run probes.

Easily scalable ? Their platform scales. Good for them. Congrats. With its centralized architecture, and the fact that, by default, every probes are run from a centralized host, Nagios may not scale well, ok. But the “few hundreds” servers assumed in this white paper is far from the limit. And you can make Nagios scale. I don’t claim it is easy though.

green ? my Nagios server is running on top of the cloud. It’s green too ! it’s cool too ! what a joke !

Ok, that was fun. Just a few totally irrelevant arguments against using Open Source Monitoring Software by a provider of a proprietary monitoring solution …

It reminds me when Nominum was arguing about their “superior proprietary solution”, allegedly more secure because the source code wasn’t available. Just like if cache poisoning attacks were caused by the availability of BIND’s source code.

If monitis can prove that they don’t use any kind of open source software in their platform, they may have good basis in such arguments, but I just doubt it. I’m pretty sure they are using open source software all over their platform. For a start, netcraft.com data about their web servers doesn’t display such a dislike toward OSS when it comes to web servers and operating systems. I can’t help but wondering if it is the same internally.

In any case, they should not shoot on projects such as Nagios, which at least, must have helped them decide to design their own proprietary platform ! The reasoning in this white-paper is completely flawed. It should be titled “Why Monitis hosted monitoring is better”, and every reference to “Open Source Software” in there should be replaced by “self-managed monitoring solution”.